Partisan styles of self-presentation in U.S. Twitter bios.

ABSTRACT: Political polarization in the United States goes beyond divided opinions on key political issues, extending to realms of culture, lifestyle, and social identity once thought to be apolitical. Using a sample of 1 million Twitter bios, this study investigates how users' partisan self-presentation on social media tends to include cultural as well as political markers. Representing the text in Twitter bios as semantic networks, the study reveals clear partisan differences in how users describe themselves, even on topics that seem apolitical. Consequently, active Twitter users' political alignments can be statistically inferred from the non-political references in their bios, even in the absence of explicitly partisan language. These findings offer further evidence of partisan polarization that

SUBMITTER: Essig L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10784547 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature