Controlling the Discourse: Who Steers Conversation on Social Media?

• In Event: What Makes It Go Viral?

Abstract

Why do some issues become popular on social media while others do not? Why do particular parts of a topic get more engagement than others? While there has been a great deal of research on the effects of social media on political outcomes from voting to protesting, few researchers have been able to examine comprehensively how an issue becomes politicized online, or doesn't. In this paper, we present and test a simple theory of political communication suggesting that the relative weight of elite voices engaging early on in social media discourse around a particular issue plays a determinative role in both how long an issue survives and how widely engaging it becomes.

Properly gauging the relative success of issues and sub-topics requires a near comprehensive history of every communication or potentially popular viewpoint surrounding the issue - a difficult limitation for researchers to overcome. In this paper, we restrict our analysis to two broad topics that have been popular on social media in the past decade: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) policy debate and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We collect over 150 million combined tweets about CCSS and BLM for the period of January 1, 2010 - December 31, 2018, representing arguably as close to a comprehensive history of communication of these issues on Twitter as is possible to collect. We focus on the popularity of sub-topics within these two broad areas, as estimated in a Correlated Topic Model, and determine the degree to which the status of the authors involved in each sub-topic determine the sub-topic's long-term growth and survival.

Contrary to our theoretical expectations, we find that elites (political or otherwise) do not drive the success of particular sub-topics, and are no more likely to drive non-elite focus than they are to be driven by it. In both areas of interest, politically focused non-elites have the strongest influence in shaping the discourse. Elites remain the main source of information dissemination, but seem to serve as a reactive force on actual content. These findings are important because they discuss the way issues are politicized online by different groups, with real-world implications for public opinion and policy.

Authors

• Sean Kates, University of Pennsylvania

• Zhanna Terechshenko, New York University

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University