Political hashtag hijacking in the U.S.

Hadgu, Asmelash Teka; Garimella, Kiran; Weber, Ingmar

doi:10.1145/2487788.2487809

Cited by 46 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Furthermore, our definition of political position entirely relies on the hand tagged hashtags classification. It is well known that hashtags can be hijacked [43], i.e. they can be used by some users with a different (or opposite) purpose than the one originally intended, thus invalidating the sentiment inferred through it.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

et al. 2019

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Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks. Mining 12 million Twitter messages, we reconstruct a network in which users interchange opinions related to the impeachment of the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We define a continuous political position parameter, independent of the network's structure, that allows to quantify the presence of echo chambers in the strongly connected component of the network, reflected in two well-separated communities of similar sizes with opposite views of the impeachment process. By means of simple spreading models, we show that the capability of users in propagating the content they produce, measured by the associated spreadability, strongly depends on their attitude. Users expressing pro-impeachment sentiments are capable to transmit information, on average, to a larger audience than users expressing anti-impeachment sentiments. Furthermore, the users' spreadability is correlated to the diversity, in terms of political position, of the audience reached. Our method can be exploited to identify the presence of echo chambers and their effects across different contexts and shed light upon the mechanisms allowing to break echo chambers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

et al. 2019

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“…Findings from Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature have generally focused on how political or social-issue hashtags act as resources for particular communities to coalesce around shared interests [1,5,11,17,36,62,64] and assert particular identities [13,32,43,57]. In this vein, scholars have explored how hashtags inform debate around political issues [26] and challenge public perceptions around contested social topics [8,14,36]. This scholarship generally takes the perspective of the communities who are using hashtags to provide a frame for social issues around which they already affiliate [1,27,32,[34][35][36]50].…”

Section: Literature On Hashtags As Related To Social Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hashtag Burnout? A Control Experiment Investigating How Political Hashtags Shape Reactions to News Content

Rho

Mazmanian

2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news posta practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags often belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and drifts [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags-signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue-influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people's motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments.

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“…While filter bubbles are defined by their separation, Hagdu et al note that a hashtag can be a point of negotiation, where different "sides" of a conversation engage in a hashtag war, attempting to control and define its meaning [7]. The online discourse surrounding race and police related shootings in the United States is an example where such polarization and negotiation can occur.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Election Interference

Spies¹

2019

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This research examines the relationship between political homophily and organized trolling efforts. This is accomplished by analyzing how Russian troll accounts were retweeted on Twitter in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This analysis shows that these conversations were divided along political lines, and that the examined trolling accounts systematically took advantage of these divisions. The findings of this research can help us better understand how to combat systematic trolling.

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Political hashtag hijacking in the U.S.

Cited by 46 publications

References 4 publications

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

Hashtag Burnout? A Control Experiment Investigating How Political Hashtags Shape Reactions to News Content

Election Interference

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