(Mis)representing Ideology? Examining Spirals of Conformity on Twitter

• In Event: Truth Hurts: New Data, Old Problems in Political Communication Research

Abstract

Do people express their political views differently in public than in private? This question has been a central preoccupation of social scientists seeking to explain conformity effects in authoritarian contexts and in periods of democratic collapse. Yet prominent theories, such as Noelle-Neumann’s “Spiral of Silence” paradigm and Kuran’s preference falsification model, have thus far relied on artificial experiments or hypothetical self-reports. Moreover, since the elaboration of these perspectives, the public sphere has radically shifted toward a networked space mediated by social platforms. We articulate a theory of social media spirals and test it by analyzing a unique national survey of Americans linked to their own public Twitter accounts. This dataset provides us with the three components necessary to thoroughly test for social media conformity effects: respondents’ private ideological self-placements, their tweets, and the tweets of the people they follow. When combined with a new measure of tweet-level ideology derived from an artificial neural network model, we find that the ideology of Twitter friends’ tweets is related to respondents’ own expressed ideology on Twitter. Our findings offer the first rigorous evidence of social conformity effects on social media and demonstrate a powerful methodological approach for studying these dynamics.

Authors

• William Schulz, Princeton University

• Andy Guess, Princeton University

• Pablo Barbera, University of Southern California

• Simon Munzert, Humboldt University of Berlin

• JungHwan Yang, University of Wisconsin-Madison