Abstract:
We characterize the Twitter networks of both major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with various American hate groups defined by the US Southern...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
We characterize the Twitter networks of both major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with various American hate groups defined by the US Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). We further examined the Twitter networks for Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan, for 9 weeks around the 2016 election (4 weeks prior to the election and 4 weeks post-election). By carefully accounting for the observed heterogeneity in the Twitter activity levels across individuals under the null hypothesis of apathetic retweeting that is formalized as a random network model based on the directed, multi-edged, self-looped, configuration model, our data revealed via a generalized Fisher's exact test that there were significantly many Twitter accounts linked to SPLC-defined hate groups belonging to seven ideologies (Anti-Government, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi, and White-Nationalist) and also to @realDonaldTrump relative to the accounts of the other four politicians. The exact hypothesis test uses Apache Spark's distributed sort and join algorithms to produce independent samples in a fully scalable way from the null model.
Published in: 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
Date of Conference: 28-31 August 2018
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 25 October 2018
ISBN Information: