The paper, “Political Polarization of News Media and Influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections,” by DSI Professor Alexandre Bovet and nine co-authors, was published in the current issue of the online journal Nature Human Behavior.
Social media have changed the dynamics of political communication for more than a decade. In their paper, Alexandre Bovet and his nine co-authors use nearly a billion tweets to analyze changes in Twitter’s news media landscape between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Using political bias and fact-checking tools, they measure the volume of politically biased content and the number of users spreading such information. They find that the proportion of fake and extremely partisan content decreased between 2016 and 2020. However, the results show increasing echo chamber behavior and latent ideological polarization at the user and influencer level.
“Nature Human Behavior” is an online journal from Springer Nature that bills itself as “dedicated to the best research on human behavior in the social and natural sciences.”
The full article by Alexandre Bovet and colleagues can be read here: «Political polarization of news media and influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections».