Threads and Twitter Echo Chamber Observations Using Classification LLMs
As social media becomes more and more of a central aspect of communication in a digital age, it has also become increasingly important to relay political messages for both campaign efforts and civilian discourse. As media formats have expanded and advanced throughout America’s history, political discourse has always been impacted by the media in which it takes place. As social media has allowed access for users to easily stay informed on a platform they use for frequent personal use, people are more easily able to express their political beliefs, especially in text-format social media platforms. Research has suggested participation on social media can impact an individual’s perceptions of political participation and values[1], especially in text-heavy social media platforms. Twitter (now X) has been a predominant platform used for expressing political ideas due to it being a forerunner of the text-focused format[2]. Instagram's introduction of the platform Threads competes with a similar media-sharing format with a text-focus that is advertised heavily to the large number of Instagram users. This text-driven focus allows studies to use advanced models of natural language processing to determine user sentiment towards party political planks to identify a user’s likely partisan alignment through platform posts[3].
This study asks whether the two most popular text-focused social media platforms (Twitter and Threads) can create echo chambers, defined as like-minded and ideologically reinforcing search result text. It will use a sentiment analysis LLM to uncover whether search engine results on Twitter and Threads echo the sentiment of the search query, and if results in political orientation classification differ between the platforms. The purpose is to establish whether such correlations exist, and if the correlations that occur can be consistent with user demographic differences on the two platforms, specifically observing users that align with major United States political parties.
