Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Not political
Politicians and activists like to use Twitter to inform themselves, defend their ideas, discredit their opponents and generally advance their cause. All this sometimes “viral” activity can obscure one truth: only a minority of Americans on Twitter are interested in politics. This is one of the startling findings of The Political Landscape of the US Twitterverse, a study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore and the University of Pennsylvania. “Social network users are like the American public as a whole: they are characterized by a low level of political knowledge and a disinterest in political affairs,” write the authors of the study, published in 2020 and recently updated. .
Floor lamp effect
Subhayan Mukerjee, assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore and co-author of the study, notes that journalists and other commentators who engage with Twitter are victims of the “street lamp effect”, or the classic parable of the drunkard who comes up with the idea of looking for his lost keys under the lamp post, simply because that’s where the light is. “Similarly, journalists who write on Twitter tend to use what they see [leurs flux politiques et d’autres comme eux, qui tweetent sur la politique] to support their opinions and draw often unfounded conclusions about the platform in general,” Mukerjee explains in an interview.
Entertainment first
In his study, Mukerjee shows that median American “ordinary” Twitter users had 10 entertainment-related accounts, one brand, one politics, one public figure, zero experts in politics, zero to news sites. In short, for the average American Twitter user, the social network is mainly used to get news from the world of entertainment (music, Hollywood, etc.). Also, among the most prominent people who express themselves on Twitter, the majority do not address political issues, notes the study. “The sheer number of nonpartisan opinion leaders speaking out loud on Twitter drowns out partisan voices on the platform,” Mukerjee writes.
Bad opinion poll
This false perception of the people’s supposed thirst for politics on social networks is not without consequences. For example, journalists and politicians regularly use social media to gauge public sentiment. “However, in doing so, they may be reacting to a distorted perception of reality,” since the users likely to interact on these occasions do not represent the opinion of the average user, says Mukerjee. Moreover, by quoting the tweets of political figures, journalists give them visibility that they would probably not have obtained in an “organic” way, since users are collectively few in number to follow their accounts. “It may be imperative that media coverage of political elites be based more on potentially important issues that affect more people, such as their positions on real issues, rather than their social media activity” , write the researchers.
disinterest
One of the study’s findings – that most Americans have little political following – is rarely highlighted by analysts, whether on Twitter or otherwise, while this premise should instead dominate conversations, notes Mukerjee. “In fact, as political scientist Yanna Krupnikov writes, the real divide in the United States is not between right and left, but between a politically engaged minority and a politically disinterested majority,” he says. The same goes for Twitter. Political content and trends on Twitter are not the same as the information people see day to day in their feeds. That doesn’t make them fake, just unrepresentative. »