Political Differences in SNS
Social Networking Sites (SNS) postings reveal emotions, socioeconomic membership, personality types, and political affiliation residue, which allows researchers to determine these by examining the content utilized in the posting (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015; Sylwester & Purver, 2015). This residue is known as self-disclosure, which is where the person reveals information about themselves through content which they post and communications (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015). SNS allows for an abundant, varied audience, and without the use of privacy setting, often the audience is unintended (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015; Sylwester & Purver, 2015). Ekman’s six emotions and their synonyms are used to identify emotions within a post; they are joy, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015). These emotions are utilized to predicting political affiliation (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015; Sylwester & Purver, 2015). In Sylwester and Purver’s 2015 study, they utilize the “Big Five” personality traits, which are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, Haidt’s The Moral Foundations theory, which identifies five factors of their morality, Schwartz’s Basic Personal Values, which identifies 10 aspects that motivates behavior within a culture, and Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (p. 2-3). They use these theories along with word usages to identify differences between conservative and liberals (Volkova & Bachrach, 2015).
In Volkova and Bachrach’s 2015 study, they found that conservatives have a higher percentage of joy and fear posts, while liberals have a higher percentage of sad, and a lower percentage of positive emotions (p. 732). Volkova and Bachrach found that liberals are more active on Twitter (2015, p. 733). In Sylwester and Purver’s 2015 study it was found that liberals used more 1st person singular pronouns, swear words, positive emotion words, and anxiety words, and conservative utilized more, 1st person plural pronouns, religious words, and tentative words (Volkova & Bachrach, 2005, p. 11-12). Another difference among conservatives and liberals was in their tweet post content: conservatives’ posts contained religion, national identity, in-group identity, government and law, and their opponent; whereas, liberals tweeted more about emotions, entertainment and culture, and international affairs (Volkova & Bachran, 2015, p. 13-15)
Photos used under Creative Commons from Johnny Silvercloud, Ashley Coates, Alek S., More pictures and videos: [email protected]