Opinion Leadership on Social Media: The Case of Facebook and the Brexit Debate

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Abstract

This paper examines the role of opinion leaders in political
discussions on Facebook in the period leading up to the U.K.’s
2016 referendum on membership in the European Union.
From the hundreds of thousands of people who comment on
the public pages of major political parties, opinion leaders are
identified by using a measure designed to quantify academic
impact. The paper tests the hypothesis that exposure to these
opinion leaders’ comments increases other users’ likelihood of
becoming involved in the main online campaigns for the referendum.
To deal with the problem of selection bias, which
arises due to the observational nature of the data, a matching
method is used to pair similar exposed and unexposed individuals
based on observable characteristics. After controlling
for each user’s behaviors, the results show that exposure to
opinion leaders is estimated to have a modest increase in the
odds of becoming involved in the campaigns.

Author

• Thomas Davidson, Cornell University