Quantcast
ZME Science
  • CoronavirusNEW
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Science News

Morally outraged tweets spread better, but largely stay within ‘red’ and ‘blue’ bubbles

A graph that speaks 1,000 words about how ideology is trapped in the same bubble on social media.

Tibi Puiu by Tibi Puiu
December 4, 2017
in News, Psychology
ADVERTISEMENT

For a long time already, social media has been an important platform for spreading information. A new study from Pew Research claims that 62 percent of people get their news from social media, with 18 percent doing so very often. Twitter and Facebook are often cited as leading factors playing roles in important sociocultural turn of events from the Arab Spring to the US presidential election. Psychologists at New York University learned that “moral-emotional language in political messages substantially increases their diffusion” but also that these retweets largely came from same-minded people. The graph below speaks 1,000 words about how ideological thinking can get trapped in the same bubble.

Blue represents liberal tweeters and red represents conservatives. Each point is a tweet that feels in a certain political discussion while lines represent retweets. The two are sometimes connected but not very often. Credit: William Brady.
Blue represents liberal tweeters and red represents conservatives. Each point is a tweet that feels in a certain political discussion while lines represent retweets. The two are sometimes connected but not very often. Credit: William Brady.

Preaching to the choir

The researchers scraped 563,312 tweets about three controversial topics: Gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change. Each tweet was sorted into three distinct categories based on the type of message: moral language (words like ‘duty’), emotional language (words like ‘fear’), or language both moral and emotion (words like ‘hate’).

Moral-emotional content was the most successful kind of language on twitter, with each additional word increasing their diffusion by a factor of 20%. Psychologists use the term “moral contagion” to describe the process of expression of moral-emotional language over social media.

Get more science news like this...

Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

ADVERTISEMENT

According to Quartz, the NYU researchers employed an algorithm that measured “political persuasion based on follower networks”. This helped the team establish the ideological pole of each twitter user. As far as messages about gun control or climate change are concerned, these were far more likely to get retweeted in the same ideological group and quite unlike to reach out-group users. Content about same-sex marriage tended in the same direction but didn’t prove statistically significant.

“Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality,” the authors wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Tags: twitter
Tibi Puiu

Tibi Puiu

Tibi is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines.

Follow ZME on social media

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.