Twitter and the Public

Twitter and The Public 0

Twitter and the Public

Does social media in The U.S., specifically Twitter, impact one’s political activism, positively, negatively, or not at all, and does it add to one’s overall political awareness?

Christian Ferrante

12/7/2014

''Politics, noun. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

– Ambrose Bierce


Introduction

So many of the assigned texts for this course portray a harshly divided political arena

within society, with segregated and many times uninformed voters split along party lines. Robert

Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), illustrates the growing isolation in society, as people are

focused less on social activities and more on solitary ones. This trend seems contrary to what

social media and technology both strive to achieve, bringing people together and creating a

conducive environment to share ideas. One would think that this would bring people together

and create a conversation about current issues, and ultimately bring about consensus on issues.

Morris Fiorina in Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics (2012)

argues that the disagreement between each side does not lay so much in polarized issues, but in

common issues of peace and social betterment. Much like other authors, Fiorina (2012) submits

that there is no “off the shelf solution” the current polarization of politics. Furthermore, in Kay

Schlozman’s The Unheavenly Chorus (2012), the disparity between elite’s involvement in

politics versus the poor’s, paints a dire picture of American politics. Yet social media is very

much available, and in many cases affordable, even to those on the lower socio-economic wrung.

These tools are useful to both the rich and the poor, as one can see celebrities and politicians

having millions of followers, at the same time as someone who posts funny one-liners or cat

pictures. The ability to reach millions of people has never been easier. So how does this

technology affect one’s political awareness, and similarly, one’s political activism? Does it add

to political awareness, or is one predisposed to think politically before they engage on social

media, limiting external influence on users? Encompassing all of these ideas, and after

examining background information to help formulate original research, this paper will attempt


to answer, with some significance, as to whether social media in The U.S., specifically Twitter,

impact one’s political activism, positively, negatively, or not at all, and does it add to one’s

overall political awareness?

Social media is a relatively new form of communication, made popular in the past

decade. It allows people to connect instantly and over great distances. Because of this, many in

the political science field have sought to associate political sentiment on Twitter and other social

media outlets with voting patterns and election results. There are countless studies that explore

this very new field of research, and many believe that social media is an unreliable source to

gather political information. Yet there are still significant findings that pertain to Twitter as a

viable means for gauging political awareness. Many studies focus specifically on gauging votes

and predicting elections. While that is not the focus of this paper in particular, these sources help

to formulate similar methods of conducting the research in question. By analyzing the supposed

mistakes and drawbacks of examining Twitter users in relations to politics, the original research

that will follow in this paper can be more accurately adjusted to reflect significant results.

Several key studies helped to formulate the general direction in which this research resulted.

Examining studies that resulted in significant conclusions help to see what methods worked.

However, equally meaningful are the studies that explore less into results, but instead further into

the methods of research. Using these types of studies as a basis for my own research helps to

possibly remove some of the problem that are explored within these studies.

Background Research


Social media presents an interesting platform for sharing ideas. What inspired this paper

and the question for which an answer will be sought was derived from the many studies that have

already been conducted using social media as a source of data. I found that while perusing my

own Twitter, there was a good amount of political activity in my feed. As an example, I

personally follow news sources and will sometimes retweet articles I find interesting or thought

provoking. Yet when I looked at the ad’s put up and the tweets of my fellow users, I found that

some in my circle did not appear to tweet political. Being so many tweets in a given day, I knew

it was impossible for me to simply try and read all of these tweets, so that is when I thought of

the question of Twitter’s impact on user’s political activity and awareness. I began to research

several studies that delve into Twitter’s use politically. While I did not find a great deal of

research on my topic specifically, I did find many useful studies in the methods of conducting

research using Twitter.

In Understanding the Demographics of Twitter Users, authors Alan Mislove, Sune

Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, and J. Niels Rosenquist (2012) submit that,

“Twitter users significantly over represent the densely population regions of the U.S., are

predominantly male, and represent a highly nonrandom sample of the overall race/ethnicity

distribution.” (p.4) Mislove et al. (2012) looked at the race, gender, and geographic location of a

number of Twitter users. One of the key arguments in the discussion of social media and

gathering significant data lays in how the data is collected, and if the sample accurately

represents the total population. There are studies that support both sides of this argument,

Mislove et al. (2012) being one.


Yet in What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment, authors Andranik

Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger, Philipp G. Sandner, and Isabell M. Welpe (2010) conducted a

study of German elections and, “found that Twitter is indeed used as a platform for political

deliberation. The mere number of tweets reflects voter preferences and comes close to traditional

election polls, while the sentiment of Twitter messages closely corresponds to political

programs, candidate profiles, and evidence from the media coverage of the campaign trail”

(p.183). What is interesting about Tumasjan et al. (2010) is that their results matched the data

from non-Twitter users, the average voter who doesn’t necessarily use Twitter. This data is

interesting because, while not focused on the U.S., it does highlight some of the purported

usefulness of Twitter as a political platform. The problem Mislove et al. (2012) has with

gathering data from social media, that sample may not represent an unbiased segment of the

population, is further illustrated by Daniel Gayo-Avello , Panagiotis T. Metaxas, and Eni

Mustafaraj, in their paper Limits of Electoral Predictions using Social Media Data. (2011)

“…[S]ocial media allow[s] manipulation by those who have something to gain by

manipulating them, such as spammers and propagandists. They write programs that create lots of

fake accounts and use them to tweet intensively, amplifying their message, and polluting the data

for any observer. It’s known that this has happened in the past (Mustafaraj & Metaxas 2010)”

(p.7). This raises a very interesting point, and also a big issue as to what can be achieved in

trying to gauge political activity using social media. Per Gayo-Avello et al. (2011), it is almost

impossible to completely be sure that large data-mining studies are not relying in some part on

fake accounts, or those who have specific agendas on Twitter. So in Tumasjan’s findings, there


could be fundamental errors inherent in collecting large groups of tweets from random users.

This perplexity is something that is a continuing debate in the field of political research. But at

the very least, Tumasjan et al. (2010) gives researchers an idea as to how Twitter might correlate

to public awareness and activity.

Gayo-Avello et al. (2011) deserves further examination as its implications can help to

formulate better research methods. One of the biggest problems Gayo-Avello et al. (2011) finds

is the hindsight nature of Twitter analytics. The authors argue that too often data is interpreted

after the fact and allows for slants in which direction the author chooses to support. In the

prediction of future elections, Gayo-Avello et al. (2011) found that data collected from social

media “did only slightly better than chance.” This is due to the fact that, “so far, only a very

rough estimation on the exact demographics of the people discussing elections in social media is

known, while according to the state-of-the-art polling techniques, correct predictions requires the

ability of sampling likely voters randomly and without bias.” (p.8) Thus studies like Tumasjan et

al. (2010) are relying on less than unbiased data, because it is very hard to get the proper

unbiased sample. Furthermore, when conducting research using social media, one must be wary

of looking at data in a way that supports the suspected hypothesis.

Another instance of the drawbacks of using Twitter as a means to gauge political opinion

and awareness is reflected in On Using Twitter to Monitor Political Sentiment and Predict

Election Results. Adam Bermingham and Alan F. Smeaton (2011) examine the elections in

Ireland and the results in terms of volume of tweets and the sentiment within those tweets.

Bermingham et al. (2011) find that gauging political sentiment is difficult because it is a


“reactive” result that may be based on interpersonal sentiment, or reaction to a news event or

other external source. They did find that volume was the best way in predicting elections,

although with some error in the sampling of this data. One of Bermingham et al.’s (2011) bigger

issues is that certain parties lend themselves to using social media. They cite the instance of the

Green party, which tends to entice a younger crowd who may be more tech savvy than say the

conservative parties. This is an important distinction to make in my own research, as I will be

focusing primarily on the 18-25 demographic, and thus the users within may tend to have a left

leaning perspective on issues. But the drawback mentioned in their study does not greatly hinder

my own, as the very purpose of my research is to look at a younger demographic in terms of

political awareness and activity.

Many of the drawbacks mentioned in these studies are very closely related to their topics,

namely predicting elections. There appears to be great difficulty in this endeavor as researchers

are limited in their scope and to the reliability of their results. So many factors play into Twitter,

race, age, geographic location, and income level that it is easy to have information that does not

accurately represent the total population. Tumasjan et al. (2010) examined 100,000 tweets, and

there is meaningful results in their eyes. Yet Gayo-Avello et al. (2012) argues that this data can

easy be misconstrued as the source of the data is easily manipulated. In conducting my own

research I have attempted to adjust my methods in a way that will allow for some sort of

meaningful conclusion to be drawn in light of the many limiting factors of this type of research.

Another huge factor that has been mentioned before is the individual themselves. In

Bermingham et al. (2011) they find it difficult to attribute personal sentiment to solely internal or


external factors, making it difficult to predict sentiment. In the following section which will

highlight the methods of my research, I will explain how this was beneficial to my survey, as I

attempted to incorporate both aspects of personal sentiment into the awareness and activism one

exhibits on Twitter.

Twitter is unique in that it is constantly changing. When a user goes on to Twitter

there is no set home page. The user has their own page from which they can see their own tweets

and followers, but the feed is a constantly changing source for new blurbs of information.

Facebook is another popular social media site, yet I found this site not be as useful for the

question I sought to answer. Facebook is constructed solely based on the users input, somewhat

similar to Twitter. Where they differ is that Facebook is heavily rooted in the peripheral elements

of social media. Things like games, charities, fun groups, event invitation, birthday notifications,

and family members take up a large majority of Facebook usage. Facebook is more focused on

social connections, the timeless nature of relationships (i.e. photos, birthdays, social groups,

family members.) Twitter on the other hand represents timely interactions. Twitter is an ever-

changing beast that is constantly generating new information that is second hand or even further

removed from ones immediate connections. The benefits of using Twitter over Facebook or

other social media sites is that Twitter allows users to see information other than to what they

subscribe. Thus Twitter creates the perfect environment to explore user’s interactions in the

political world. The next section will cover the research question previously posed, the methods

used to conduct the study, and the hypothesis for the results.

Original Research Methods


The discussion in the last section explained the various methods that are used when

conducting research using social media, as well as many of the drawbacks. The goal then of my

own research was to try and pull away some significant results while avoiding the messy nature

of such an endeavor. As mentioned, Twitter proves the more applicable site to study, because of

the ability for politics to penetrate user’s feeds, as feeds are not just based on their own likes or

even the likes of friends, but on overall trends on the social media site. I thus decided that the

best and most readily accessible way for me to gather research would be to survey my own

personal group of followers and try and see if there was some association between a user’s

political awareness and activity, and their Twitter usage.

The original goal for my sample was fifty respondents. Using the site,

surveymonkey.com, I created a twenty-eight question survey, designed to gauge ones basic

political awareness, as well as Twitter usage, and finally one’s political activity on Twitter. The

goal was to find an equal number of both male and female users across as diverse an ethnic

background as possible. The first group of questions assessing political awareness were the

starting point for me to gauge the average user’s knowledge about very basic facts. This section

included: How many years are in a presidential term, how many congressional senators are from

each state, how many Supreme Court justices are there, etc. In asking these types of questions, I

wanted to compare the results from my specific demographic, 18-25, to every demographic.

A very useful study done by the Pew Research Institute (2010) examined the overall

political awareness of a surveyed 1,001 respondents. They found that the majority of people,

regardless of demographic, be it age race income, were aware about the basic facts in regards to


politics. As Figure 1 shows, most in the youngest demographic knew less of political facts than

the older demographics.


Figure 1

This is the key area that I wanted to look at in the first part of my survey, are those within

my target demographic politically knowledgeable? I looked at each question individually to see

how the overall responses compared to Figure 1.


The next portion of questions focused on each respondents Twitter usage. Did they use

Twitter every day, did they follow political figures, what types of users did they follow most,

where did they get their news from, etc. These questions are important to answering my question

because they help to separate heavy users and light users. Those who use Twitter less frequently

are probably less likely to see political Tweets than those who do. This was an important aspect I

kept in mind when analyzing the final results. A second study done by Pew Research Institute

(2014) shows that approximately 19% of online adults use Twitter. Of those 35% are in the 18-

29 demographic. Figure 2 shows the rapid increase in social media usage by all adult

demographics. The most drastic increase was not surprisingly in the youngest demographic. This

information is an important part of how I formulated my questions. I wanted to gauge just how

important Twitter was to users and if it was actually used enough for people to even be able to be

reached by political activity. This information from Pew showed me that there should be a good

number of users who use Twitter habitually and should lead to many people seeing political

activity on twitter, and possibly contributing to it.

Figure 2


The third portion of questions, and arguably the more important set, gauge the user’s

political activity on Twitter. These questions included: Do you participate in protests, boycotts,

and petitions, do you see political ads, and do you see tweets or ads by politicians and or parties.

These questions are the core of my research, as they illustrate the effectiveness of Twitter as a

disseminating platform for political information. Finding out if heavy users see political ads or

tweets from candidates or politicians will show if Twitter has the ability to effect user’s political

awareness. If a user sees political ads or political tweets, news stories, then that exposure should

work positively in Twitter’s favor for increasing political activity. Users who might not have any

inkling as to the political climate should be exposed to key issues, whether by trending topics,

friend’s retweets, or ads. Examining again a third study done by Pew research Institute (2013)

shows that “38% of those who use social networking sites (SNS) or Twitter “like” or promote

material related to politics or social issues that others have posted.” Further, Pew (2013) shows

that roughly the same number of users from republican, independent and democratic parties use


Twitter. I should then find that roughly equal numbers from each party should respond to my

survey.

Having researched into how social media can be used a political barometer, and having

formulated a method of testing its efficiency, I have thus arrived at some general theories about

what the results could potentially show. Based on the information from Gayo-Avello et al and

Tumasjan et al. I have tried to build a survey that will try and limit the drawbacks of trying to

gather data from social media. The questions were constructed to help compare my results with

those from Pew. I hypothesize that in the area of political awareness, most will be able to answer

my questions correctly, demonstrating a basic level of political knowledge. In comparing the

results from my specific demographic to the older demographics, I should find the older

demographics to know more about basic political facts. Continuing on, I theorize that the levels

of political activity in my survey will roughly match the levels found by Pew (2013) and (2014).

Causation is a big factor in this study, meaning does Twitter cause political activism and

awareness, or is it predetermined based on users own interests? I have tried to gear my survey in

such a way that it is more asking users to qualify and quantify their interactions with political

activity, meaning does Twitter have the means to raise political awareness. The first area of the

study aids this latter part in that if most people are generally knowledgeable about basic political

facts, one could assume that they are not completely in the dark about most issues, and even if

they don’t think politically when entering twitter, there should be ample evidence that one can

take away some political influence when leaving Twitter. Thus based on the previous


information and in light of the Pew studies, I believe that there will be a beneficial nature to

using Twitter, in regards to political activism and awareness.

In the next section I will analyze the results from my survey, comparing each factor

mentioned about to some of the data found by Pew. While some of this information will correlate

nicely, the specific questions asked by Pew differ somewhat in their difficulty and specificity.

The goal however is still achievable, as these questions still seek to solve the answer to my own

question.

Research Findings

Over the course of a month and a half, I send out survey links to users on Twitter, friends,

and friends of friends. The goal was to only reach out to people who used Twitter. Keeping this

in mind I also passed out survey information to fellow students in my non-political classes. I

ensured with 100% certainty that all of the people participating in the survey were doing so with

the knowledge that it would only count if they use Twitter. As an added incentive, I passed out

free candy, as well as offered a gift card to one random respondent, to increase willingness to

participate. Thus over this time period I contacted and distributed survey information to roughly

two-hundred people. As mentioned previously, the goal was a mere fifty respondents. The total

sum that responded was forty-four, but unfortunately six of those responses were unusable as

respondents did not answer all pf the questions and questions that were answered were not taken

seriously. Thus the total number of credible responses was thirty eight. While this fell short of

the desired goal, the information gathered still combined enough to make for some significant

analysis.


There were a slightly higher number of male respondents than female respondents, even

though roughly the same number of each was initially contacted to participate. There were

twenty-three males, and fifteen females. In terms of age, the desired interval was achieved, will

all participants being within the 18-25 demographic. Figure 3 illustrates the dominance of

Caucasian respondents over every other

Figure 3

group of respondents. This factor is one of the many limiting aspects of using surveys in this

regard. Indeed this problem that had been addressed by Mislove et al. (2012) proved hard to

counter as even though roughly equal numbers from each demographic were contacted, the

overbearing sample of white users proved inescapable from the low level or responses. I don’t

believe that race necessarily plays a factor in political awareness and activity, as much as social

economic status, as made abundantly clear by Schlozman (2012).

The next group of questioned were used to gauge the respondents political awareness.

All but one respondent knew that Joe Biden was vice president. 94% knew that the same person

can be elected president twice, and so on. The very basic questions were very easily answered.

Questioned that may be perceived as more specific were harder to answer, as Figure 4 shows;


Figure 4

almost half of the respondents incorrectly answered as to how many U.S. Supreme Court justices

there are at one time. Another interesting question, “If the President of the United States is

unable or unwilling to serve or is removed from office by Congress, the Vice President would

become President. If the Vice President is unable or unwilling to serve, who would be eligible to

become the President next?” showed that roughly a third of respondents did not know the correct

answer. These more specific questions proved to give respondents more trouble than the very

basic questions. Per Pew (2010) and what Figure 1 tells us, this makes sense.

The next group of questions sought to understand the Twitter usage of respondents, how

often and to what purpose. 57% percent of respondents said that they used Twitter often, or

every day, while only 15% said rarely. As Figure 5 shows, the majorities of respondents use

Twitter to interact with friends, follow celebrities, and as an afterthought, follow politicians. This

was not surprising to find because according to Pew (2013) “20% have used the tools to follow

elected officials and candidates for office.” This figure roughly matched my own results,


Figure 5

.as roughly 23% of respondents follow a politician or political party on Twitter. This is

interesting because while the number correlates to the Pew (2013) study, Figure 5 shows that

these types of accounts are the least important in terms of whom users choose to follow. When

asked if politics was an important part of their Twitter usage, approximately 55% said disagree

or strongly disagree.

Another instance of political activity on Twitter was gauged by the question, have you

tweeted at the president or a political party or candidate? According to Pew (2013) 34% have

used social media to post their own personal views and share them with others. Yet in this

instance, only roughly 19% of the respondents to this survey answered yes to the previous

question. It is startling to find that number so much lower. Even more startling, only 5% of

respondents said that they sometimes tweet about political topics, events, etc. with the other 95%

saying rarely or never.

Continuing in this vein of questions, respondents were asked if Twitter affected their

political awareness. Approximately 70% said that Twitter affected their political awareness

either a little or not at all, while only 5% indicated a good amount. This is contrasted again by

Pew (2013) which polls 16% having their views altered by political activity on social media.


These two statistics correlate because alter implies that their current awareness is changed

because of information on Twitter, positively or negatively. In fact according to Pew (2013), 9%

of Users become less involved because of social media.

Continuing through the data it appears that much of the hypothesis was incorrect as to the

trends of social media. While Pew (2013) found that 25% of social media users had increased

their political activity as a result of social media, my results showed that political activity was

influenced by political ads and tweets from politicians for approx. 5% of respondents. One of the

major questions in connection to my research topic was to find out if Twitter at least provided

some level of penetration into the average Twitter user’s feed. I found that of those surveyed,

only 10% said they saw political ads or tweets often, and 29% saying sometimes. The vast

majority of twitter users are not seeing political tweets even though they are present, as

according to Pew (2013), 33% have reposted a political message that was originally posted by

someone else. Finally, again comparing the data to that of Pew’s, and as Figure 6 shows, I found

that the majority of my respondents said that Twitter did not make them want to be politically

active.

Figure 6

This data again contrasts what Pew (2013) tells us about trends with social media. The facts

seem to indicate the opposite of what was predicted at the onset of my research. Yet what is


interesting to contemplate is that Twitter has the makeup of being a useful tool for political

activity.

Significance of Findings

The information presented in the above section draws a section look. It is important to

summarize and understand how the hypothesis differed from the actual results. First, as

theorized, it does appear as though most on the 18-25 demographic do know the most basic

political facts. And similar to Pew (2010), the more in depth questions proved to be the more

challenging, as less in the demographic got them correct. This aspect of the hypothesis seemed to

be the only truly correct part, as much of what was found, seemed to contradict the predicted

outcome. For the majority of users it appears that Twitter is by and large a social media platform

in terms of friends and celebrities (Figure 5). Even though the number of users who follow

politicians was slightly higher than that of Pew (2013), it seems that those politicians and parties

that garner those followers either fail to adequately promote their “brand,” or are merely

absorbed into the vastness of the instantaneous posting site. As far as political awareness, this

study does not support the same levels that were found in the studies done by Pew. There were

far less people that were made aware of political issues on Twitter, even though there was

evidence so support that there was indeed political information to be consumed. 25% of those

that responded said that they got their news from site like Twitter, and 40% said that they

consume at least 1-2 hours of news a week. 26% said 3 hours of news or more were consumed,

yet the translation to Twitter seems minute.


What this data tells us, is that meaningful impact on user’s political motivation, be it

awareness or activity, and is severely impacted by the utilization of Twitters main purpose:

connecting to friends. The answers to the many questions above help to draw the conclusion that

even people with moderate levels of political interest (as most said they read the news, knew

basic political facts) do not necessarily translate that interest onto a social media platform. Pew

(2013) found that, “The large majority (73%) “only sometimes” or “never” agree,” with friends’

political views and, “when they do disagree with things their friends have posted, most SNS

users (66%) say they typically ignore these posts. However, some 18% of social networking site

users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone for political reasons.” This information can

translate into my study, as those with a moderate level of political activity and awareness of

often turned off by political messages on Twitter.

It would be a leap to say for most people Twitter has a negative impact on user’s political

activity. There is evidence as just mentioned that Twitter can have an impact on a small

percentage so great that they will block followers. This is interesting because it would appear

that a far greater number of users in the Pew study were seeing so many political tweets and ads.

Perhaps the limited scope of my own research hinders the magnitude of the conclusion; however

there is significant information from this survey to suggest that Twitter does not influence a

user’s political activity either positively or negatively. In regards to political awareness, I believe

that Twitter does increase a user’s awareness because of the ability for users to see political ads

and tweets. The value of users who follow political entities found by Pew (2013) matched this

study’s findings, and supports the claim that Twitter does possess the ability to positively affect


users’ awareness of political issues. That being said, the ability of Twitter to help translate that

information into activity seems limited by the users themselves, and perhaps the failure of those

political entities that are being followed to generate enough dialogue or interest to propel users

into action further than discourse. This data can be used to help shape how Twitter is perceived.

It seems that in some of the background studies that were discussed, Twitter is taken too

seriously as a means to gauge political sentiment for the whole population. The is indeed a vocal

element to Twitter, which as micro blog platform it may lend itself to the quick point political

speeches of those who hold politics as a key point in their lives. But what this data has shown is

that Twitter is limited by its users. Even though this data significantly shows that Twitter does

not increase a user’s political activity, somewhat contrary to Pew (2013), it does at least create

awareness for issues to be discussed and possibly acted upon.

Conclusion

Social Media does present a new and somewhat exciting way to spread information.

There is growing segment in political science that seeks to quantify and analyze the information

that seems so readily available and accessible. Researchers who are able to side step the many

inherent flaws in collecting data from these types of sites could perhaps pull away meaningful

information that could tell us more about the public and their political views. Regardless of

political background, sites like Twitter present an opportunity to those with less of a platform

than others to share ideas. In terms of politics, Twitter is a great place to raise awareness about

issues. The common young adult Twitter user with a moderate level of political knowledge has

the ability to further understand the complex nature of the political sphere and to perhaps


translate that awareness into activism. This last aspect proves to be the more difficult endeavor

as the many less important and distracting elements of Twitter tend to obscure any shining light

of information that may present itself.

In the end it is up to the individual user to decide if he or she wants to be politically

active, there is no mechanism as of yet that can force someone to do something (other than

coercion). In Politics and the Twitter revolution: How tweets influence the relationship between

political leaders and the public, by John H. Parmelee (2012), the authors conclude that it is an

“oversimplification” to say that Twitter is either good or bad for politics, it still can be used to

see what exactly people are saying, and how views differ along ideological lines. Yet the

fundamental blocks are there for users to build upon their awareness and use it to their

advantage. So much of what Putnam (2000) talks about paints a very morbid picture as to the

state of the U.S. in terms of political discourse. Yet social media presents a way out of the so

called darkness. If user’s had motivation to increase their interest and couple that with their

awareness, and then act upon it, then perhaps there would not be such low voter turnout that has

been witnessed the past several decades.

Social media lends itself to the educated and the younger generation (Pew, 2014). There

are at least some positive aspects to a seemingly less than productive source of social interaction.

Whereas sites like LinkedIn are focused on business connections, Twitter is focused on social

connections. When there is a realization that political and social very much intertwine, perhaps

we will see what has been mentioned in this paper a few times; acting upon that awareness.


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Twitter and the Public

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