The Ideological Evolution of Social Network Sites

Abstract

In the last decade, online sphere has been extensively transformed while going through the other dimension of development. The Web 2.0 idea where people can be more actively involved on the site has been materialized through invention of a novel online platform such as microblog or Social Network Sites (e.g., Myspace, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter). Social network sites (SNSs) play the most pivotal role in changing people's contemporary lifestyle and exercise a remarkable impact on the events of the real world. Clearly the performance in civic engagement through social network sites is also very impressive and uniquely Twitter has been regarded as a key. In this study, I examine how ideological polarization among users has changed over time in Twitter by data mining and network analysis. Here I analyze followership between legislators and users and then compare the extent of political polarization and concentration in the respective years. The results show ideological polarization and concentration in Twitter has been more or less alleviated over time although its extent of change is very small. The result also indicates the liberal users are more likely to follow liberal legislators. Furthermore this liberal's like-minded followership is found to get distinctively bigger as time goes on. The findings suggest users in new media sphere do not linger at a stable status but rather dynamically changed. The current study is expected to enrich the classic debates over online group polarization and to be one of cornerstones of new media study in political communication context.