Preaching to the choir: ideology and following behaviour in social media

Abstract

Social media offers a new channel to connect political elites with potential supporters. However, the flow of information between the two groups is constrained by a deliberate decision to actively listen only to some politicians based on the messages that users potentially favour. Previous research has posited that, if ideological proximity is an explanatory factor of the decision to follow certain political elites in social media, it should be possible to recover the political preferences of users from following behaviour. Using a unique database with survey data about the demographic characteristics and political attitudes of 5580 Twitter users, I show that, although ideology indeed explains following behaviour on Twitter, interest in politics induces a pattern of selection that limits what we can know about the ideological distribution in the population. My results provide direct validation of a previously hypothesised behaviour in the literature and have implications for the use of a proximity model to infer the state of public opinion using Twitter data.