Extra, Extra, Tweet All About It!: How Twitter Became Synonymous with News
Our team is researching the impact of Twitter as a technology on people’s real world political opinions. We will consider how the platform is set up, how this technology enables political discussion and this all ends up influencing people’s opinions. Here is our research survey and as of 10/30/19, 37 people have completed it.
Below is an outline of the data we collected and analyzed, categorized according to type of data. (Some of the data is summarized in the infographic above).
Demographics: We present our analyzed data regarding the demographics of the people who took our survey including aspects such as age, gender, education level, geographical location and more in the infographic above.
Twitter Usage: We also analyze how our survey takers use Twitter, what thoughts or perceptions they have on the use of Twitter as a platform for political discussion, where they tend to get their political news and where they believe most people get their political news in our infographic.
Research Interest: We had three research topics survey takers could indicate interest in learning more about and they include: political bias of Twitter’s algorithms, the development of digital news media and Twitter’s influence on political opinions. Our survey indicated that the third topic garnered the highest interest with 89.1% of survey takers indicated high interest followed by the second topic then the first topic. Interest level was determined by having respondents rate on a scale of 1 - 5 (5 being the highest interest), how interested they were in learning more about the topic. We then classified levels 4-5 as high interest, level 3 neutral, and level 1-2 low interest. Based off of this, the topic of Twitter's influence on political opinion had the greatest percentage of high interest.
Research Display: We also analyzed which methods of displaying our research survey takers would find the most engaging. 75.7% of respondents indicated they wanted to see infographics with the second most popular presentation method being tweet-style with 40.5% respondents choosing this option.
Research Direction: The reason we decided to take our research in this direction is because we sent out a survey that asked people which topics they were most interested in learning about and the topic of “Twitter’s impact on political opinions” garnered the highest interest (as opposed to “The development of digital news media” and “Political bias of Twitter’s algorithms”). The questions we want to focus on all revolve around how Twitter as a platform inadvertently affects people’s political opinions. Some example focus questions are: how does Twitter’s user policies and “rules” affect how political opinions are shared and hence perceived? How do certain functions of the platform influence political bias and outrage? How does the platform produce echo chambers and what are the effects of this?
Research Targets: Our research aims to target Twitter users as well as general social media users who encounter and/or participate in political discussion online in order to inform them of how they are being subconsciously (or consciously) affected. We also aim to target technology users in general to keep the general population informed about how political opinions are being affected, particularly during a time where politics seems to be more and more polarized.
Research Presentation: We plan to deliver our research through a combination of text explanations, “tweets” and infographics. The reason we decided on these methods is because considering we are looking at Twitter, it seemed appropriate to incorporate the Twitter look into our own website, hence we want to make certain sections look like real tweets. We also want to use infographics as this was the most popular option when survey takers were asked how they would like to have the research presented. Finally we want to incorporate text explanations because considering we are taking a critical examination of Twitter, it would be ironic if the entire website was styled like Twitter so instead we will supplement the “tweets” with text.