English

2020 U.S. presidential election in swing states: Gender differences in Twitter conversations

Social and Information Networks 2022-07-15 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

Social media is commonly used by the public during election campaigns to express their opinions regarding different issues. Among various social media channels, Twitter provides an efficient platform for researchers and politicians to explore public opinion regarding a wide range of topics such as the economy and foreign policy. Current literature mainly focuses on analyzing the content of tweets without considering the gender of users. This research collects and analyzes a large number of tweets and uses computational, human coding, and statistical analyses to identify topics in more than 300,000 tweets posted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and to compare female and male users regarding the average weight of the discussed topics. Our findings are based upon a wide range of topics, such as tax, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of the topics, there exists a significant difference between female and male users for more than 70% of topics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.09416,
  title  = {2020 U.S. presidential election in swing states: Gender differences in Twitter conversations},
  author = {Amir Karami and Spring B. Clark and Anderson Mackenzie and Dorathea Lee and Michael Zhu and Hannah R. Boyajieff and Bailey Goldschmidt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09416},
  year   = {2022}
}