Horowitz: Twitter Provides a Distorted Window into American Public Opinion

Horowitz: Twitter Provides a Distorted Window into American Public Opinion

Generalizing about what the American public believes from what you see on your Twitter feed is a big mistake, according to a recently released national survey conducted by Pew Research Center.

Ninety-seven percent of tweets about national politics are generated by just 10% of Twitter users, Pew finds, and these users are not representative of the rest of the people on twitter, let alone the general public. "Taken together, strong disapprovers and strong approvers of Trump generate 97% of all tweets mentioning national politics from U.S. adults on Twitter”

More specifically, 72 % of tweets about national politics are posted by people who strongly disapprove of Donald Trump and 22% are posted by people who strongly approve of the president.  While President Trump is very unpopular with nearly half the American public as a whole and 55% of all Twitter users strongly disapproving of his performance as president, the percentage of tweets about national politics produced by those strongly opposed to him still far exceed these percentages.

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But the more important distortion for journalists or anyone else attempting to understand American politics through their Twitter feed or broadly sampling opinions posted on Twitter is that people with more nuanced views of the president or national issues generally are largely absent from the conversation. This admittedly smaller percentage of Americans, are likely to include the dwindling percentage of swing voters, probably in the 7 to 10% of the electorate range, who will have an outsized impact on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. The voice of these Americans, who are far less intensely engaged and interested in politics, and as result post about politics very infrequently, if at all, is mainly absent from Twitter.

Since for those who are actively engaged and interested in politics, their individual Twitter Feeds are likely to reinforce and amplify their own points of view, given that our Twitter followers tend to share our opinions, the absence of tweets reflecting less certainty and posing more questions strikes me as even more of a problematic distortion of where the broad American public is politically, than the anti-Trump tilt of the volume of tweets over-all.  After all, the general opinion in the electorate for and against President Trump is easily accessible from the plentiful national polls done each week.

It is also important to keep in mind that only a little more than 1-in-5 American adults are Twitter users as compared to the nearly 7-in-10 American adults that are Facebook users. While Twitter has a considerable footprint and politicians, journalists and celebrities’ tweets receive widespread media coverage, the prevalent opinion of its impact as a medium of political communication is a bit over-blown.  President Trump’s more than 60 million twitter followers is frequently sited as a sign of the power of Twitter, for example, however, experts, including Pew, who have examined the composition of his followers, coupled with extensive survey data estimate only about 11 million or so of those followers are American adults, and there is a big slice that are bots or made-up names that people use to facilitate trolling.

Twitter remains a good way of weighing in and sharing your opinion on the issues of the day and of following people who are of interest to you, but if you rely on it to tell you what your fellow Americans believe about politics and government, you are going to be lead astray.

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.