The paper is a study of almost three years
of Twitter conversation around Brexit which
I got from the Twitter API; that's over nine
million tweets. The key driver for this, what
we're trying to find out is how the two sides
- the Leavers and the Remainers on Twitter
- interact with each other and how might this
make the people on Twitter more susceptible
to disinformation that aims to divide around
political topics like Brexit. When people
are part of a tribe and they are compelled
to be hostile towards their opponent, there's
quite a strong incentive to share pieces of
content that can help them to get 'one-up',
to score points against that opposing side.
I think a lot of time that happens, people
share which thinking or analysing the content.
I know I've done that myself. I think we've
all tweeted or shared something based on the
title and that resonates with our world view
and fits into how we see the world. We can
just share it so quickly that we don't really
have time to dig into whether it's actually
true or not. That's one reason why I think
that fact-checking efforts might not be as
effective as we would hope because of this
whole knee-jerk reaction and this compulsion
to use content as a way to attack the other
side, whether it's true or not.
