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ISSUE
TRACKER
Where is there room for common ground on Twitter? This tool tracks hashtags that are used by both Democrats and Republicans on Twitter and also describes the similarity in the tone of tweets across parties. If people from both parties use language that is very positive, for example, the sentiment score would be "very similar." Click the hashtags below to see the most popular tweets using these hashtags right now.
HOW DOES IT
WORK?
We track a very large group of Republicans and Democrats who use Twitter and collect all of their tweets each month. We then identify the top hashtags used by people in both parties and use additional data we have about the people in our study to estimate the percentage of people who are tweeting about each term who are from each party. Next, we use machine-learning models to detect the valence or sentiment of all of the other words in the tweet. We calculate the distance between the average sentiment score of people in both parties to create the "Cross-Party" sentiment score below.
WHAT DOES IT
MEAN?
Many people worry that social media echo chambers prevent people from listening to each other-- or start having different types of conversations altogether. You can use this tool to identify where cross-party dialogue is happening on social media, and identify how polarizing each topic/hashtag is using the "cross-party sentiment" tool above.
WHAT SHOULD
I DO NEXT?
Combined with our bots that expose people to moderate members of the other political party, we hope this tool will help you learn how to create consensus on social media. If you'd like to take a deeper dive to understand the echo chamber, check out our echo chamber explorer.
F.A.Q.s
"A lot of the hashtags you track don't seem to have anything to do with politics, why?"
Though many people want to engage about politics with people from the other side, research also suggests that most Americans don't like talking about politics. We think it's important to keep non-political topics in mind as you reach across party lines because connecting over past-times, entertainment, or other issues may help people connect across partisan divides.
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