Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets

Felix Ming Fai Wong; Chee Wei Tan; Soumya Sen; Mung Chiang

doi:10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422

Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets

Felix Ming Fai Wong, Chee Wei Tan, Soumya Sen, Mung Chiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Princeton University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Media outlets and pundits have been quick to embrace online social networks to disseminate their own opinions. But pundits' opinions and news coverage are often marked by a clear political bias, as widely evidenced during the fiercely contested 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Given the wide availability of such data from sites like Twitter, a natural question is whether we can quantify the political leanings of media outlets using OSN data. In this work, by drawing a correspondence between tweeting and retweeting behavior, we formulate political leaning estimation as an ill-posed linear inverse problem. The result is a simple and scalable approach that does not require explicit knowledge of the network topology. We evaluate our method with a dataset of 119 million election-related tweets collected from April to November, and use it to study the political leaning of prominent tweeters and media sources.

Original language	American English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013
Publisher	Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Pages	640-649
Number of pages	10
ISBN (Print)	9781577356103
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422
State	Published - 2013
Event	7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013 - Cambridge, MA, United States Duration: Jul 8 2013 → Jul 11 2013

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013

Other

Other	7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013
Country/Territory	United States
City	Cambridge, MA
Period	7/8/13 → 7/11/13

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Media Technology

Access to Document

10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422

Cite this

Wong, F. M. F., Tan, C. W., Sen, S., & Chiang, M. (2013). Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013 (pp. 640-649). (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422

Wong, Felix Ming Fai ; Tan, Chee Wei ; Sen, Soumya et al. / Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2013. pp. 640-649 (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013).

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title = "Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets",

abstract = "Media outlets and pundits have been quick to embrace online social networks to disseminate their own opinions. But pundits' opinions and news coverage are often marked by a clear political bias, as widely evidenced during the fiercely contested 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Given the wide availability of such data from sites like Twitter, a natural question is whether we can quantify the political leanings of media outlets using OSN data. In this work, by drawing a correspondence between tweeting and retweeting behavior, we formulate political leaning estimation as an ill-posed linear inverse problem. The result is a simple and scalable approach that does not require explicit knowledge of the network topology. We evaluate our method with a dataset of 119 million election-related tweets collected from April to November, and use it to study the political leaning of prominent tweeters and media sources.",

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year = "2013",

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booktitle = "Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013",

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Wong, FMF, Tan, CW, Sen, S & Chiang, M 2013, Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets. in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 640-649, 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013, Cambridge, MA, United States, 7/8/13. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422

Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets. / Wong, Felix Ming Fai; Tan, Chee Wei; Sen, Soumya et al.
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2013. p. 640-649 (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

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AB - Media outlets and pundits have been quick to embrace online social networks to disseminate their own opinions. But pundits' opinions and news coverage are often marked by a clear political bias, as widely evidenced during the fiercely contested 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Given the wide availability of such data from sites like Twitter, a natural question is whether we can quantify the political leanings of media outlets using OSN data. In this work, by drawing a correspondence between tweeting and retweeting behavior, we formulate political leaning estimation as an ill-posed linear inverse problem. The result is a simple and scalable approach that does not require explicit knowledge of the network topology. We evaluate our method with a dataset of 119 million election-related tweets collected from April to November, and use it to study the political leaning of prominent tweeters and media sources.

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Wong FMF, Tan CW, Sen S, Chiang M. Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. 2013. p. 640-649. (Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013). doi: 10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14422

Quantifying political leaning from tweets and retweets

Abstract

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