Find little evidence that American Twitter is as politicized as it is made out to be, with politics & hard news outlets constituting a small subset of these opinion leaders; ordinary Americans are significantly more likely to follow nonpolitical opinion leaders

The Political Landscape of the U.S. Twitterverse. Subhayan Mukerjee, Kokil Jaidka & Yphtach Lelkes. Political Communication, May 31 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2075061

Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan than the American citizenry, who are generally characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysis of the most popular accounts on American Twitter. We identify opinion leaders by drawing random samples of ordinary American Twitter users and observing whom they follow. We estimate the ideological leaning and political relevance of these opinion leaders and crowdsource estimates of perceived ideology. We find little evidence that American Twitter is as politicized as it is made out to be, with politics and hard news outlets constituting a small subset of these opinion leaders. Ordinary Americans are significantly more likely to follow nonpolitical opinion leaders on Twitter than political opinion leaders. We find no evidence of polarization among these opinion leaders either. While a few political professional categories are more polarized than others, the overall polarization dissipates when we factor in the rate at which the opinion leaders tweet: a large number of vocal nonpartisan opinion leaders drowns out the partisan voices on the platform. Our results suggest that the degree to which Twitter is political has likely been overstated in the past. Our findings have implications about how we use Twitter and social media, in general, to represent public opinion in the United States.

Keywords: Twittersocial mediapoliticizationpolarizationecho-chambers

Check also other literature with references: Politically partisan left-right online news echo chambers are real, but only a minority of approximately 5% of internet news users inhabit them; the continued popularity of mainstream outlets often preclude the formation of large partisan echo chambers