Breaking the Echo-chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

Social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public discourse and political conflict. But political conflict also shapes behavior on social media. This paper investigates the response of social media users to political events during the height of the independence struggle in 2017 in Catalonia (Spain). The analysis exploits linguistic markers to study retweets within and across Catalan and Castellano language groups in a large Twitter corpus of 26 million tweets during this conflict. To be able to study changes in retweet behavior, the article proposes a statistical decomposition into ‘exposure’—the likelihood of encountering specific content—and ‘retweet rates’—the probability of retweeting content once exposed. Surprisingly, the political events were associated with a dramatic relative increase in retweet rates across language groups and a corresponding explosion of exposure. There is evidence of a realignment, where left-wing content from both language groups was spread more strongly in the other language group.