A First Look at the Political Uses of Quote Retweets

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Yelena Mejova, who presents a paper on the new 'quote retweet' feature that Twitter introduced in April 2015. This form of retweeting includes the retweeted tweet as a URL in the retweet, and can be used for somewhat different purposes from other forms of retweeting: while button retweets may imply an endorsement of the original message, the substantial space for including the retweeter's views in a quote retweet might be used for more critical engagement with the quoted material, for instance.

This study builds on the dataset of 192 US political accounts maintained by FollowerWonk, and examined how the messages from these accounts are quote-retweeted. This can be used to endorse, criticise, or simply forward politicians' tweets to other users.

The users who use such quote retweets tend to be more experienced Twitter users: they have more followers and have tweeted more than the average user, for instance. Quote retweets also tend to spread information more than other forms of retweets: the fraction of new recipients who would not yet have seen the original tweet is greater than for other forms of retweets.

Quote retweets also tended to be more civil than replies to the same tweets (they contained fewer insults or hate speech), and there was more agreement or neutral sentiment in quote retweets than disagreement, so there still is an element of endorsement here. This may be seen as contributing to an improved political discourse – but the feature is still new, and changes in use practices are likely to happen over time.