Why most Twitter users don’t follow political ‘elites’ but celebrities

new York: Most Twitter users don’t follow political elites, and they’re more likely to follow celebrities than an elected official, researchers suggest.

Despite the prominence and influence of presidents, congressmen, journalists, pundits, and the news media, researchers found that only 40 percent of Twitter users follow one or more political “elites,” and the remaining 60 percent don’t follow any political actors at all study published in the journal Science Advances.

“However, those users who follow political accounts on Twitter adhere to siled online communities and primarily follow and share information from their political group,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, lead author and professor of communications at the University of California, Davis. and the University of Amsterdam.

In other words, given the ongoing debates about so-called “echo chambers” on social media platforms, the small group of users who follow political elites show clear political bias and engage very one-sidedly with these elites.

The findings come after the researchers analyzed four years of data from a sample of 1.5 million Twitter users.

The researchers concluded that while the group of social media users displaying political bias in their online behavior is small, it is nonetheless consequential.

“Given that we analyzed over 2,500 American political elite accounts, including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, prominent pundits like Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity, and popular media outlets like MSNBC and Fox News, only 23 percent of the representatives are a sample of over 1.5 million users following three or more such elite accounts is instructive,” said Wojcieszak.

The research also uncovers important ideological asymmetries: Conservative users are about twice as likely as liberals to share content inside and outside the group, and add negative comments to out-of-group sharing.

“Overall, the majority of American Twitter users are not sufficiently interested in politics to follow any political or media elite from our list,” Wojcieszak said.

With growing radicalization in America, declining support for democratic norms, and rising support for political violence, concerns about political bias on social media platforms are valid, no matter how small the groups displaying that bias may be.