Political Elites in the Attention Economy: Visibility Over Civility and Credibility?

Abstract

Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust ecosystem of nationally focused media outlets, sub-national politicians are more likely to openly disseminate harmful content with limited media scrutiny. In this paper, we analyze the factors that explain the online visibility of over 6.5K unique state legislators in the US and how their visibility might be impacted by posting low-credibility or uncivil content. We conducted a study of posting on Twitter and Facebook (FB) during 2020-21 to analyze how legislators engage with users on these platforms. The results indicate that distributing content with low-credibility information attracts greater attention from users on FB and Twitter for Republicans. Conversely, posting content that is considered uncivil on Twitter receives less attention. A noticeable scarcity of posts containing uncivil content was observed on FB, which may be attributed to the different communication patterns of legislators on these platforms. In most cases, the effect is more pronounced among the most ideologically extreme legislators. Our research explores the influence exerted by state legislators on online political conversations, with Twitter and FB serving as case studies. Furthermore, it sheds light on the differences in the conduct of political actors on these platforms. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role that political figures play in shaping online political discourse.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Percentage of uncivil and low-credibility posts across years, by party, by platform. Republicans have a higher rate of posting low-credibility content on both platforms and across years. The yearly posting rates of uncivil content are comparable across parties.
• Figure 2: Percentage of uncivil and low-credibility posts from states, by party, by platform. Republicans have a higher rate of posting low-credibility content across all states, on both platforms. Moreover, Republican legislators from most states have a higher rate of posting uncivil content on FB. State and party-wise differences exist for posting rates of uncivil content on Twitter. Note that the x-axis scale has been adjusted to better visualize party differences.
• Figure 3: ECDF plots of overperforming score distributions by party, by platform. Distributions are similar for Twitter but posts by Republicans overperform more on FB.
• Figure 4: Effectiveness of deconfounding for uncivil vs. civil tweets. (A) shows the T-SNE space of content embeddings for civil vs. uncivil tweets by party. (B) shows the representation of the deconfounded embeddings returned by Dragonnet. After deconfounding, the representation space for treated and control covariate distributions ( party in this example) can not be distinguished.
• Figure 5: Covariate balance after matching. All covariates, except for party, and state in Twitter uncivil model, are balanced (i.e., absolute standardized difference $<0.1$ ) after matching on deconfounded embeddings.