meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Science Quickly

Nonpolitical Tweets May Reveal Political Bias

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2015

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Word selection among Twitter users who could be identified as likely members of one or the other political party showed specific usage patterns. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

J-P. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot CO.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.6

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Talata. Got a minute?

0:39.5

It can be rude to talk politics over dinner, explicitly at least.

0:44.2

But subtle linguistic cues might reveal more than you think about your political views,

0:48.8

whether at the dinner table or on Twitter.

0:51.4

There's a lot of information in the details of our language.

0:55.2

Matthew Perver, a computational linguist at Queen Mary University of London.

0:59.0

The little words that we use, the way we join together our sentences, and the kind of

1:04.2

interactional patterns, the way we react to other people.

1:07.1

Perver's research team used Twitter as their communications forum, randomly selecting 28,000

1:12.6

users, half of whom clearly followed one political party's Twitter feeds, for example,

1:17.6

at GOP, but not the other, for a more or less even split among Republicans and Democrats.

1:23.6

Then they analyzed the words in those users' timelines during a two-week period in June 2014.

1:29.6

As you might expect, the tweets of users who followed Republican accounts were a lot more

1:33.6

likely to contain words like Obamacare and Benghazi, whereas Bridgegate came up more among

1:39.1

Democratic followers.

1:40.8

But the researchers also found that left-leaners were much more likely to use words like

1:44.9

than were the righties. And whereas Republican followers preferred plural pronouns like

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scientific American, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Scientific American and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.