The structural transformation of the public sphere has intensified in the age of social media. The leading platform for the purposes of political discussion is Twitter; its digital nature has permitted extensive studies into subjects ranging from Mo Salah’s influence on the frequency of racism, to the nature of Russia-related discourse before and after the invasion of Ukraine. Its utility in discourse and content analysis is a salient fact in contemporary social sciences scholarship. Understanding how to extract and analyse Twitter data is now a powerful tool within any profession or research department. Furthermore, the study of the platform itself offers insight into the current epistemic environment.

Twitter and the ‘Public Sphere’:

Importantly, the characteristics of the debates on Twitter highlight a shift in the epistemic environment of the twenty-first century. A delineating element of any democracy appears to be the equality placed on the epistemic value placed on its constituents. Twitter - and other social media platforms - present a further transformation of Habermas’ ‘public sphere’; defined as an area “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state”. These platforms may enable the full extraction of the value of Friedrich Hayek’s ‘dispersed knowledge’: this is the knowledge which is intrinsic to each discrete person; shaped by their experience and expertise.

Josiah Ober has argued that the employment of diverse sources of knowledge was intrinsic to the success of the Athenian state in antiquity; the only state in history to have operated as a direct democracy for an extended period of time. Capturing the benefits of dispersed knowledge and shaping our democracies around such a principle would appear to carry significant potential benefits, even within a competitive international environment. Social media may offer the tool through which this can be crafted.

Is this their current use? Studies have varied on their opinion on the effect social media has on democracy. Nonetheless, the utopic view of the internet as the panacea to the sickness within modern democracies was misfounded. Social media platforms are subject to elite-capture, meaning that powerful interest groups - such as corporations or governments - are able to overrepresent their views. The current epistemic environment is a continuation of Habermas’ ‘bourgeois public sphere’; the transformation that occurred after the Enlightenment period, where the public debate came to be dominated by monied views as advanced through the old mass-media.

Social media, if adequately regulated, could offer an environment for productive political discussion. This medium of communication could offer a direct line of communication to political representatives, or, even further, facilitate methods of decentralised democracy. The key word is ‘could’ as these functions are not clearly monetizable.

Twitter as a Data Source:

Twitter as a data source offers an unmatched insight into the views of any specified group within society. The data visualised below was gathered from the tweets of Conservative MPs between October 2019 and February 2022. A corpus of words related to the Russian government was applied to the ‘text’ variable of these tweets in order to determine the nature of discourse vis. Russia prior to their invasion of Ukraine. This is a standard form of content analysis, which was previously conducted by a human, but can now be automated through programming languages such as ‘R’ or ‘Python’.

The creation of a word-cloud is an immediately striking visualisation of data. Here, it reveals that the most common word under the parameters above is ‘true’. Cross-referencing this with qualitative analysis could reveal the statements Conservative MPs deemed as ‘true’. More obviously, it shows the epistemic warfare occurring within digital platforms. In regard to the conflict in Russia, determining information which is ‘true’ is of particular importance.

Twitter offers a massive data set for analysis within political science. The tools needed to automate this task are easy to learn and offer a competitive edge over those who lack them. Thus, learning how to utilise Twitter data should be advised to all who are interested in conducting professional or personal political research.

by Harry Fuller

A Brief Look at the Current and Potential Uses of Twitter for Political Research