A recent study published in Scientific Reports provides new insights into how partisan content spreads on social media during election campaigns. This study focused on Twitter activity during four consecutive national elections in Spain, and found that positive messages about users’ preferred political party were more effective than negative messages about the opposing party. This suggests that it will spread widely.
In other words, “intra-party love” is better shared and propagated than “out-party hatred,” even among extremist groups. This challenges common perceptions about how social media contributes to political polarization.
Many commentators believe that social media plays a key role in promoting political polarization, allowing like-minded people to form tight-knit communities that reinforce negative views of opposing political parties. He claims to be playing a role. This is particularly relevant to the rise of populist right-wing parties. However, the evidence from previous studies has been inconsistent. Some studies suggest that users are exposed to a greater variety of opinions than expected, while others argue that social media amplifies extreme partisan attitudes.
The researchers behind this study aimed to clarify these conflicting findings by focusing on Twitter behavior during election campaigns. Election periods are critical periods when political competition is most pronounced, and social media platforms are frequently used by political parties and their supporters. The Spanish situation, characterized by the rise of several new political parties and significant ideological fragmentation, provided an ideal case to study these dynamics.
“We are interested in polarization from a general perspective because it appears to be spreading across multiple countries and has potential harm to democracies.” said study author Samuel Martin Gutierrez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Complexity Science Hub who conducted the study. While a doctoral student at the Polytechnic University of Madrid.
“In this paper, my collaborators and I focused on online communication. Both experts and laypeople alike agree that online political communities are organized in echo chambers, and that social networks carry negative and polarizing messages. Because we tend to believe that this is more widespread than positive messages, we would like to see if this is the case in a systematic study.”
For their study, researchers looked at Twitter activity during Spain’s two national elections in 2015 and 2016, and again in 2019. To collect the data, the researchers used Twitter’s public data stream and focused on tweets that mentioned major political parties. and their leaders. These tweets were identified by specific keywords such as party names, slogans, and candidate names.
The researchers then focused on retweets as a key measure of influence and message spread. They argued that retweets represent more than mere acknowledgment. This reflects a user’s active decision to share a message with their followers, thereby increasing the message’s reach.
To analyze the data, the researchers focused on three main variables. The first is user ideology, where Twitter users are categorized into left-right ideological spectrums based on their retweet patterns. Users who frequently retweeted content from left-wing parties were classified as left-wing, and users who retweeted content from right-wing parties were classified as right-wing.
The second variable is retweet efficiency, which measures how effectively a user’s content spreads on the platform. This was calculated by averaging the number of retweets each user received for their tweets. The higher the average number of retweets, the more efficiently that user’s content is being spread.
Finally, the researchers examined intra-party content and extra-party content. This involves distinguishing between positive messages that express support for a user’s own political party (intraparty content) and negative messages that target other political parties (extraparty content).
The study found that Twitter users were much more likely to retweet positive messages about their own political party than negative messages about the opposing party. This trend was consistent across all four elections analyzed. Even among users who supported radical parties such as far-left Podemos and far-right Vox, positive internal party messages were more likely to be shared than hostile outside messages.
Interestingly, the study also found that while negative non-party messages are common on Twitter, they are less effective in terms of widespread dissemination. In fact, tweets attacking opponents tend to receive fewer retweets, even when posted by users affiliated with extremist groups. This suggests that although users may express hostility toward others, they are less likely to share such messages with others.
The researchers observed that areas of high retweet efficiency, or areas where content spreads fastest, were dominated by positive intraparty messages. These areas, which they described as “epistemological bubbles,” were ideologically homogeneous and primarily involved users sharing messages within their own political groups. However, these bubbles were more likely to amplify messages of support within the party than hostility outside the party.
“We were surprised to find such a clear difference in the types of messages posted by users who retweet the most and those who retweet less,” Martin Gutierrez told PsyPost. “Typically in this kind of real-world social research, the statistics are not so clear-cut. However, our results show that users with a low average number of retweets send positive internal messages and negative external messages at similar rates. , whereas users with a high average number of retweets post almost exclusively positive internal messages.”
Another important finding is that the rise of new political parties, such as the far-right party Vox, has contributed to the creation of more ideologically homogeneous online communities. As these political parties became more famous, Twitter users became more likely to cluster in groups that engaged primarily with like-minded people. However, even within these more radical groups, positive messages within the party were more successful in spreading than negative messages outside the party.
“The most relevant result is that this notion that hateful messages spread further seems misguided. Instead, users with higher average retweets are more likely to support political parties.” We found that most people post positive messages that reinforce their affiliation,” said Martin Gutierrez.
“But beyond that, we realized that the concept of echo chambers does not fully capture the structure of online political communities. Users within echo chambers are not only isolated from outside information; , actively discrediting and excluding external sources. Given our results, we need to consider the concept of epistemic bubbles, in which people do not necessarily attack members of outside groups. In short, while perception bubbles are effective in spreading messages online in political environments, echo chambers are not. Understood.”
Although this study provides valuable insight into how partisan content spreads on social media, it also has some limitations. First, this study focuses only on Twitter, which is just one of many social media platforms. The power relations observed on Twitter may not be the same on other platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, and users may engage with political content differently.
Another limitation is our focus on retweets as a measure of influence. Retweets are an important way to spread information on Twitter, but they’re not the only form of engagement. Users may also privately like, comment on, and share tweets through direct messages, but these forms of engagement were not captured in our research.
“We cannot establish a clear causal relationship between message popularity and message content. Do popular users post more positive messages, or do positive messages make users more popular?” (The opposite is true for negative messages),” Martín-Gutierrez said.
The study also simplified the ideological landscape by grouping parties into left-wing and right-wing blocs. This approach may overlook important nuances in how users engage with particular political ideologies, especially in multiparty systems like Spain.
“While this simplification is widely used, multiparty democracies are typically multidimensional, so it is necessary to fully characterize this ideological space and to be able to distinguish between parties of similar ideology. Martín Gutierrez said: “We addressed this question in another paper.”
Future research could also examine how the results of this study apply to other countries with different political systems and patterns of social media use. Although the Spanish context provided a useful case for studying political polarization, it is not clear whether these patterns also apply to other contexts, such as the United States or the United Kingdom.
“My long-term goal in this field of research is to go beyond diagnosing polarization and using data and quantitative methods to understand its structural causes,” said Martin Gutierrez. “I am interested in understanding how societies that are not initially polarized become polarized.”
“In online communities, intra-party love spreads more efficiently than extra-party hate,” a study by Samuel Martín Gutiérrez, José Manuel Robles Morales, Mariano Torcal, Juan Carlos Lozada, and Rosa -Written by Maria Benito.