The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public became more polarized in response to these influences over the course of the election is not well understood. In this paper we propose IdeoTrace, a framework for (i) jointly estimating the ideology of social media users and news websites and (ii) tracing changes in user ideology over time. We apply this framework to the last two months of the election period for a group of 47508 Twitter users and demonstrate that both liberal and conservative users became more polarized over time.
There is also a large body of work around opinion dynamics, which aims to trace the evolution of users' opinions over time. Note that while this paper is primarily concerned with the estimation of users' political ideology, the term is a generalization of the concept of political ideology, and is defined as an individual's cognitive orientation towards an object", such as an event, topic, or another individual, and can be represented using a real-valued scalar or vector @cite_40 .
@cite_40
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We study opinion dynamics models where agents evolve via repeated pairwise interactions. In the compromise model, agents with sufficiently close real-valued opinions average their opinions. A steady state is reached with a finite number of isolated, noninteracting opinion clusters (“parties”). As the initial opinion range increases, the number of such parties undergoes a periodic bifurcation sequence, with alternating major and minor parties. In the constrained voter model, there are leftists, centrists, and rightists. A centrist and an extremist can both become centrists or extremists in an interaction, while leftists and rightists do not affect each other. The final state is either consensus or a frozen population of leftists and rightists. The evolution in one dimension is mapped onto a constrained spin-1 Ising chain with zero-temperature Glauber kinetics. The approach to the final state exhibits a nonuniversal long-time tail.