Study: Social Media Engagement Can Have an Effect on the Outcome of Political Races

A new study has found an empirical connection between social media activity and real-world outcomes in the context of political communication.

The findings by Jinping Wang, University of Florida College of journalism and Communications (UFCJC) Advertising assistant professor, Pennsylvania State University Professor S. Shyam Sundar and Stanford University Professor Nilàm Ram were featured in “Can Social Media Engagement Predict Election Results? Bandwagon Effects of Tweets About U.S. Senate Candidates” published in Social Media + Society on Nov. 21.

The researchers investigated the effectiveness of Twitter bandwagon metrics as a public opinion resource to predict election results of U.S. Senate elections.

According to the authors, “We developed a non-linear growth modeling tool to identify the point in time at which bandwagon support for competing candidates begins to diverge. We also discovered that bot-driven tweets play a negligible role.”

They add, “This study has demonstrated the value of bringing together concepts and techniques from such disparate areas as media effects, human-computer interaction, big-data computational analysis and longitudinal non-linear dynamics to demonstrate an empirical connection between social media activity and real-world outcomes in the context of political communication. While our analysis has focused on political tweets in the run-up to US senatorial elections, the bandwagon effects demonstrated here and the analytical approaches used in our work can be applied to a number of other domains, such as the study of misinformation, health, and lifestyle-related bandwagon cascades, and thereby validate our efforts to treat social media platforms as petri dishes for predicting and understanding larger social phenomena.”

Posted: November 26, 2024
Category: College News
Tagged as: Advertising, Jinping Wang, Political Communication, Political Elections, Social Media