A study published in Scientific Reports has provided insights about which type of partisan content spreads more quickly on social media, especially X, after looking at activities on X during four consecutive elections. It was found that in-party love is shared more actively on X than out-party hate. For the study, the researchers focused on Twitter activities during elections in Spain in 2015, 2016 and two times in 2019. They identified tweets with keywords related to parties, slogans, campaigns and candidate names.
The researchers focused more on retweets as retweets identify that the users are acknowledging the message behind the tweets. Researchers analyzed the data based on three variables. Users who retweeted right wing parties were named right-learning and users who retweeted left ring parties were named left-learning. The second variable was knowing the efficiency of retweets, meaning how much retweets users were doing on the platform. Thirdly, in-party tweets and out-party tweets were examined.
The research found out that users tweet more about the parties they love than the parties they hate. This trend was seen in all four elections in Spain. The study also found out that even though there were many out-party negative tweets on the platform, they do not tend to spread widely and get only a few retweets. In-party positive tweets were more likely to spread widely and were more in number than out-paty hate tweets.
This study shows an interesting difference between supportive and hate tweets about parties during election days. But it has some limitations too. First of all, this study was only done on Twitter and not other social media platforms. Secondly, this study only focused on retweets as a measure of influence. The study also categorized tweets in only right-wing and left-wing blocks. So, if a more extensive study happens, all of these points should also be considered.
Image: DIW-Aigen