Twitter Has Not Gotten Redder After Elon - BCB #86

Also: how your personality affects your politics, and Americans say Hitler belongs to the opposing party

Twitter content and users remain slightly Blue

It’s conventional wisdom – at least among Blue folks – that Twitter (now X) has become a haven for deep Red views since Musk’s takeover in October 2022. But coincidentally, a group of researchers was conducting a long-term study on the political ideology of Twitter content around the same time, and their data doesn’t show that. They find that Twitter content has remained slightly Blue on average, and other sources show that the user base still leans somewhat Blue as well.

Ideological leaning of news content seen by a sample of Twitter users. Adapted from Freelon et al.

Analyzing personalized Twitter feeds of 900 participants, the study found that political content constituted 10.5% of all posts, with average ideological leaning slightly left of center. This leaning was scored according to Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) ratings of over 3,400 news sites. Notably, this slight Blue bias was unchanged six months after Musk took over Twitter.

“Fact quality” was also generally high with 90% of content rated “mixed” or “high,” again according to MBFC ratings. While news site quality scores are by nature somewhat subjective and certainly contentious, this study – like most – found that the news that users actually see is mostly from credible sources.

An independent study of the ideology of Twitter users shows similar results. The Neely Social Media Index survey of US adults conducted in March to May of last year – again, six months after Musk’s takeover – also shows a Blue lean, with 50% of users identifying as Democrats and only 30% identifying as Republicans.

(Source)

This seems to contradict both conventional wisdom (at least among Blue professionals) and multiple reports of an increase in Red-tinged hate speech post-Musk. Twitter did reinstate many previously banned accounts and cut back on moderation, but the overall effect of this is less clear. 

The problem is that different people are measuring different things. For example, one study searched for specific slurs, which measures posting but not how many people actually saw those posts. Another study measured “the degree to which already hateful tweeters changed their level of hate.” Musk claims that actual exposure (“impressions”) of such content is down under Twitter’s new policy of reducing the visibility of objectionable content rather than removing it. Without external access for researchers, there is no way to reconcile these different ways of measuring toxicity.

Moreover, content moderation is a somewhat different issue than the ideology of users and content. This most recent study adds to the evidence that, on the whole, Twitter remains a slightly Blue-tinted place.

How your personality affects your political tolerance

A new study tests how our inherent personality traits might shape how we react to political disagreements. 

The focus was on the Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These traits have long been thought to influence our cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses in various scenarios, including how we process information that contradicts our political beliefs. Previous studies have indicated that exposure to opposing political views, instead of fostering tolerance, often leads to resistance, which in turn could contribute to the polarization of political attitudes.

Roughly a thousand Swiss citizens completed an online Big Five personality test and were then exposed to counterarguments that challenged their position on the ongoing national referendum for a “burqa ban.” This limits the generalizability of the study to this specific policy and cultural context, but it still found some unexpected results.

Openness is associated with creativity and insight. It was expected to have an effect on the acceptance of opposing views, but it turns out it wasn't relevant. Conscientious individuals prefer order and stability, but they were not necessarily more resistant to opposing views. Instead they were less likely to engage in resisting opposing views at all. 

Some results were expected: extraverts were more reliant on social validation to reinforce their views, agreeable people avoided confrontations with opposing beliefs, and people high in neuroticism (a higher propensity to experience negative emotions) were more sensitive to hearing contrasting views. 

Cambridge Analytica also used Big Five personality traits, when they stole millions of users' Facebook data and tried to use it to target political advertising according to personality in 2016. The evidence that this actually improved the persuasive effects of these ads is pretty slim, but this study shows that there are personality-related differences in how we engage with opposing political views.

Americans say Hitler belongs to their opponent's party

Was Adolf Hitler left or right? Turns out he's whatever your political opponents are.

(Source)

In a sneak peak from a study that’s still under peer review, 

75% of liberals said Hitler was as far right-wing as possible. But about 50% of conservatives say Hitler was extremely left-wing (& 70% of them say he was left-leaning)

Just to make things more complicated, Hitler himself denied that Nazism was either left-wing or right-wing, and criticized both sides. Despite the National Socialists using "socialist" in their name, “the consensus among historians is that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were not socialists in any meaningful sense” per Fullfact. Historians point out that the Nazi Party's early platform included socialist-like talking points in its propaganda, but these were discarded by Hitler once in power.

And yet Red and Blue each are convinced that he belongs to the other side. He is the embodiment of evil, after all. This won’t come as a surprise to regular readers who’ve seen us cover the symmetries of conflict before (like here and here).

Quote of the Week

We are not left, not right, not reactionaries. Those are concepts that don't mean anything to us. We are national socialists, we are enemies, deadly enemies of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak ... and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system.

– Adolf Hitler