Debate on political reforms in Twitter: A hashtag-driven analysis of political polarization

Abstract

Political debates about a reform may sparkle national controversies, by leading members of the community to polarize their opinions and sentiment about the topic addressed. With the rise of social media like Twitter users are encouraged to voice and share their strong and polarized views and in general people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before. The large amount of user-generated social data available is a great opportunity to investigate the communicative behaviors emerging in the context of such political debates and to shed some light on the way communities of users with different roles in the society and different political sentiment interact. In this paper we focussed on communications in Twitter around the reform of marriage in France in 2012 and 2013 - “Le Mariage Pour Tous” - which had been the subject of debate and controversy. We collected a corpus of tweets tagged by the hashtag #mariagepourtous, created to mark the messages about the reform. We applied different kinds of analysis on our dataset based on linguistic and non linguistic features of the observed data in order to investigate the communicative behavior in using subjective and evaluative language on a political topic. The analysis leaded also to reflect on the impact of different typologies of users involved in the virtual debate which included both political messages created by media organizations and by other individual users, from ordinary citizens to politicians or celebrities.