Of the various adjectives that one can think of to describe social media, perhaps balanced is not one of them.  Indeed, it’s easy to assume that so polarized are views aired on social media that it’s a small fraction of society who use it.  But of course, usage data suggests that’s far from the case, and as such, a new paper argues it provides a good window into the way society is fragmenting.

Indeed, the paper argues that rather than being un-representative, the Internet is actually merely mirroring the kind of social divisions that already exist offline.

The researchers parsed several million tweets, all of which were geo-located, to allow them to develop robust networks of who people speak to and the way they travel.  Each time people tweeted, their location and movements were revealed, thus allowing the team to illustrate clear travel patterns across the United States.

Fragmented society

These networks reveal clear communities of people who typically travel and communicate across and within clearly defined geographical regions.

While some differences between these communities did emerge, there was far more that bound them together.  People would mostly talk online with the same people they live and work close to in the real world.

This fragmentation is largely natural, as people self-organize around their personal and professional networks of friends, family and colleagues, most of whom will live and work in their particular part of the country.

Hot topics

The researchers also examined the kind of topics commonly spoken about within communities by exploring the hashtags used to identify particular topics of conversation.  The analysis revealed that conversations were not only self-contained within communities, but often discussed topics that clearly reflected regional cultures.

The analysis broke the image of the United States as a single community, and instead presented a series of highly fragmented sub-communities that respond to individual metropolitan areas.

The authors believe their work highlights that this goes way beyond there being simply red states and blue states, or even rural and urban communities, but rather there is social fragmentation across multiple scales.  They hope that this insight will better drive more cohesive and unified policy making.