Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media. New Stanford linguistics research has analyzed how Republicans and Democrats use different language when discussing mass shootings on social media and found that Republicans talk more about the shooter and Democrats focus more on the victims. New linguistics research examines social media to see how polarization spreads and how it changes over time. (Image credit: Getty Images) Focusing on posts shared on the social media platform Twitter, the researchers found that Republicans tended to concentrate on breaking news reports and on event-specific facts in their tweets while Democrats centered on discussing potential policy changes, according to the new study , presented at a computational linguistics conference in June. "We live in a very polarized time," said the study's co-author Dan Jurafsky , professor of linguistics and of computer science. "Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together. This research can also help us figure out how polarization spreads and how it changes over time." Researchers examined 4.4 million tweets posted in response to 21 different mass shooting events, including the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016, to determine what words and emotions people with different political leanings expressed.