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Political Polarization of Hashtags for U.S and U.K.

Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella
International Institute of Information Technology
PhD Application Talk
AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, MMCI  
Public Audience
English

Date, Time and Location

Monday, 25 February 2013
11:00
90 Minutes
E1 4
R024
Saarbrücken

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of political polarization of Twitter hashtags for the U.S. and the U.K. We start our analysis by identifying Twitter users that retweet a set of “seed users”, such as Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in the U.S., and assign to them the corresponding political affiliation. For these retweeting users, we analyzed over two years of tweets and hashtags. As one contribution, we present a country-independent methodology of assigning a political leaning to hashtags. We identify political hashtags from non political by looking into their co-occurrence with seed political hashtags on a weekly level, and assign a political leaning to each (hashtag, week) pair. We track changes in this leaning over time and show that hashtags can undergo sudden jumps in leanings and that these jumps are caused by a focused user group we call “hashtag hijackers”, made up by more extreme users. For new hashtags introduced by the U.K. governing coalition, we point out a tendency for these hashtags to be taken over by the opposition more than the reverse. For the U.S., we demonstrate a steady increase in polarization as the election day approached. Finally, we cluster hashtags according to their usage patterns, giving further insights into the political landscapes in the U.S. and U.K. and the change in topical interest over time.

Contact

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Tags, Category, Keywords and additional notes

Stephanie Jörg, 02/22/2013 12:06 -- Created document.