Citation

Network Amplification of Politicized Information and Misinformation about COVID-19 by Conservative Media and Partisan Influencers on Twitter

Author:
Zhang, Yini; Chen, Fan; Lukito, Josephine
Publication:
Political Communication
Year:
2022

Social media amplification is both a mechanism to attract public attention and a process of information diffusion shaped by the online social network structure. This study focuses on amplification by elites on social media and examines the extent to which traditional media and emerging partisan influencers engage in “network amplification.” Defined as like-minded elites sharing similar or/and mutual messages, network amplification highlights the interrelation and interaction between elite messages in the network communication environment of social media. This is a phenomenon worth investigating because network amplification’s resulting message repetition and reinforcement can multiply the overall effectiveness of elite messaging. Using network sampling and spectral clustering, we collected 358,707 accounts that followed 2,069,311 accounts on Twitter and detected nine distinct networks of traditional media and emerging partisan influencers. We then examined their 3,540,629 tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that 1) conservative media and influencers engaged in network amplification of politicized information and misinformation significantly more than liberal media and influencers did; 2) conservative influencers exhibited a stronger tendency to retweet and align their messages with conservative media than liberal influencers did regarding liberal media; and 3) traditional media partially drove partisan influencers’ amplification. The implications of network amplification for partisan asymmetry, misinformation, and public opinion are discussed.