Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using mixed-method techniques. The analysis is based on a dataset of 400 thousand users' 1.2 million replies to 756 candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in the two months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. We show that among moderately active users, adversarial activity is associated with decreased centrality in the social graph and increased attention to candidates from the opposing party. When compared to users who are similarly active, highly adversarial users tend to engage in fewer supportive interactions with their own party's candidates and express negativity in their user profiles. Our results can inform the design of platform moderation mechanisms to support political figures countering online harassment.
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A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network
Parler is as an ``alternative'' social network promoting itself as a service that allows to ``speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being deplatformed for your views.'' Because of this promise, the platform become popular among users who were suspended on mainstream social networks for violating their terms of service, as well as those fearing censorship. In particular, the service was endorsed by several conservative public figures, encouraging people to migrate from traditional social networks. After the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Parler has been progressively deplatformed, as its app was removed from Apple/Google Play stores and the website taken down by the hosting provider. This paper presents a dataset of 183M Parler posts made by 4M users between August 2018 and January 2021, as well as metadata from 13.25M user profiles. We also present a basic characterization of the dataset, which shows that the platform has witnessed large influxes of new users after being endorsed by popular figures, as well as a reaction to the 2020 US Presidential Election. We also show that discussion on the platform is dominated by conservative topics, President Trump, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1945058
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10252386
- Editor(s):
- Budak, Ceren; Cha, Meeyoung; Quercia, Daniele; Xie, Lexing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
- Volume:
- 15
- ISSN:
- 2334-0770
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 943--951
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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