Pandemics, Protests, and Publics

Abstract

As an integral component of public discourse, Twitter is among the main data sources for scholarship in this area. However, there is much that scholars do not know about the basic mechanisms of public discourse on Twitter, including the prevalence of various modes of communication, the types of posts users make, the engagement those posts receive, or how these things vary with user demographics and across different topical events. This paper broadens our understanding of these aspects of public discourse. We focus on the first nine months of 2020, studying that period as a whole and giving particular attention to two monumentally important topics of that time: the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging a panel of 1.6 million Twitter accounts matched to U.S. voting records, we examine the demographics, activity, and engagement of 800,000 American adults who collectively posted nearly 300 million tweets during this time span. We find notable variation in user activity and engagement, in terms of modality (e.g., retweets vs. replies), demographic subgroup, and topical context. We further find that while Twitter can best be understood as a collection of interconnected publics, neither topical nor demographic variation perfectly encapsulates the "Twitter public." Rather, Twitter publics are fluid, contextual communities which form around salient topics and are informed by demographic identities. Together, this paper presents a disaggregated, multifaceted description of the demographics, activity, and engagement of American Twitter users in 2020.

Sustained Online Amplification of COVID-19 Elites in the United States

“…The remaining panel members are classified as Independent. In separate work, we have validated that TargetSmart’s proprietary inferences of both race and political affiliation are reliable (Shugars et al, 2021).…”

“…However, different publics amplify different information sources, meaning that different publics crowdsource different elites. While prior work has demonstrated the multiplicity of networked publics on social media platforms (Jackson et al, 2020;Shugars et al, 2021), quantitative approaches still typically identify crowdsourced elites in aggregate without distinguishing how they vary in prominence and visibility across different subnetworks. Furthermore, we also often only study crowdsourced elites around particular focal events, and operationalize amplification accordingly by counting resharesor retweets on Twitter.…”

Negotiating Care Work: Gendered Network Structures of Pandemic Care Discourses on Twitter in Germany

“…According to Shugars et al (2021) women and men who tweet about Covid-19 get equal attention for their tweets. However, they found a visible gender bias among the actors receiving the most attention.…”

Disinformed social movements: A large-scale mapping of conspiracy narratives as online harms during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In networked communication on social platforms such as Twitter, communities form due to different retweeting or mentioning behaviour of users, since not everybody retweets everybody [36]. Recent research has underlined the importance of conducting disaggregated analysis of different message types and we decide to focus on retweeting, as the most commonly used messaging type on Twitter [37]. Distinct communities in hashtag discourses -and in particular retweet networks -can represent ideological alignment or at least shared opinions on a political topic such as the so-called lockdown measures designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 [32].…”