Brokerage Roles in Quote Tweets by US Congress Members

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the brokering user quote-tweets an existing message with an added @mention targetting a new user.

This is applied to a dataset of tweets by Members of Congress in the US from 2019 to 2022 that contained climate change-related keywords, and calculated the balance between the four brokerage roles for each of the Members’ tweeting activities. Further, the project applied the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2 to assess the level of moral messaging in each post; and used another tool to calculate a misinformation score for the post.

The vast majority of accounts served predominantly as coordinators, facilitating information flows amongst in-group members (i.e. within the same political party). Both parties interacted mainly amongst themselves, with Democrats especially densely connected. Democrats also used moral language mainly when talking amongst each other, while Republicans used moral language more often in other (cross-party) roles. Democrats also had a lower exposure to misinformation.