Disentangling positive and negative partisanship in social media interactions using a coevolving latent space network with attractors model

Summary . We develop a broadly applicable class of coevolving latent space network with attractors (CLSNA) models, where nodes represent individual social actors assumed to lie in an unknown latent space, edges represent the presence of a specified interaction between actors, and attractors are added in the latent level to capture the notion of attractive and repulsive forces. We apply the CLSNA models to understand the dynamics of partisan polarization on social media, where we expect Republicans and Democrats to increasingly interact with their own party and disengage with the opposing party. Using longitudinal social networks from the social media platforms Twitter and Reddit, we investigate the relative contributions of positive (attractive) and negative (repulsive) forces among political elites and the public, respectively. Our goals are to disentangle the positive and negative forces within and between parties and explore if and how they change over time. Our analysis confirms the existence of partisan polarization in social media interactions among both political elites and the public. Moreover, while positive partisanship is the driving force of interactions across the full periods of study for both the public and Democratic elites, negative partisanship has come to dominate Republican elites’ interactions since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. 1-Democrats, 2-Republicans. These results indicate presence of edge persistence (ˆ δ > 0), higher within-group attraction for Democrats than Republicans (ˆ γ w 1 > ˆ γ w 2 (mean difference = .388, SE = .035)), presence of between-group repulsion (ˆ γ b < 0), and some evidence for greater magnitude of between-group repulsion than within-group attraction for Republicans ( | ˆ γ b | > | ˆ γ w 2 | (mean difference = .050, SE = .022)), the opposite for Democrats ( | ˆ γ b | < | ˆ γ w 1 | (mean difference = SE = Our has disentangled and quantified key aspects of polarization, positive and negative partisanship, well as a concept in social network theory, edge persistence. results show that for members of Congress active on Twitter polarization across the two decade. We also study the time-varying aspects of attraction, repulsion and edge persistence by fitting a change-point version of our model. Results show that for Republican members of Congress, disengagement other dominate with their own 2015, disengagement with their own find with out-group party strong in-group attachments. Reddit. positive partisanship full length of study for both limited support for the role of negative partisanship in polarization. the modeling and