A.G. Gancarski
As Missing Persons sang decades ago: “What are words for if no one listens anymore?”
Turns out that they are useful for, among other things, tracking preferences.
In what may seem like an obvious finding, The Week reported on Wednesday on a study that said that liberals and conservatives on Twitter use language differently.
Liberals, said the report, are more “emotional.” Conservatives, more “religious.”
“Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that the language used by liberals emphasizes their perception of uniqueness, contains more swear words, more anxiety-related words and more feeling-related words than conservatives’ language. Conversely, we predicted that the language of conservatives emphasizes group membership and contains more references to achievement and religion than liberals’ language,” wrote the authors of the actual study, Karolina Sylwester and Matthew Purver.
Liberals tend to use “I” more, showing a tendency toward egocentrism; conservative language exposes a bias toward group identity, which likely will strike liberals reading this as counterintuitive.
Liberal language tends toward anxiety and emotionalism more, whereas conservatives show a linguistic bias toward religious tropes and “negative sentiment.”
Republicans in the study, curiously, tend to be followed more than they follow. Democrats, conversely, tend to follow accounts more than they are followed.
“Republicans’ greater emphasis on hierarchy, more frequent use of mentions might reflect their tendency to give credit to or acknowledge others, which may matter in maintaining a more rigid social structure,” speculate the study authors.
That emphasis on hierarchy informs some of the most popularly advanced memes by GOP account followers. Predictably, “Obamacare” and “Benghazi” are well-worn tropes in the conservative set.
“In their Twitter messages, Republicans focus on religion (god, psalm), national identity (america, american, liber, countri, border), in-group identity (conserv, tcot—top conservative on Twitter, rino—Republican in name only), government and law (illeg, lie, vote, administr, impeach, defund, clotur) and their opponents (obama, bho, obamacar, reid, pelosi, carney, loi),” reports the study.
The study “collected the user IDs of all followers of @GOP, @HouseGOP, @Senate_GOPs (406,687 in total, as of June 9, 2014) and @TheDemocrats, @HouseDemocrats, @SenateDems (456,114 in total). Next, we removed the IDs of users following both Republican and Democrat accounts, leaving 316,590 Republican and 363,348 Democrat followers after this filter. We then randomly sampled 17,000 IDs from each follower group and collected timelines and other information about user accounts and tweets. Protected accounts were filtered out, resulting in 13,740 Democrat and 14,363 Republican followers,” according to the authors.
They were restricted to 200 Tweets per follower, because of technological limitations.
