A Biased Review of Biases in Twitter Studies on Political Collective Action

TL;DR

This paper critically reviews Twitter-based studies on political collective action, highlighting methodological biases, lack of theoretical grounding, and the need for standardized approaches to better interpret social phenomena.

Contribution

It provides a systematic critique of existing Twitter research on political behavior, emphasizing the importance of theory and methodological rigor for meaningful insights.

Findings

Many studies lack theoretical grounding

Methodologies often lack validation

Research is biased towards methodological innovation

Abstract

In recent years researchers have gravitated to social media platforms, especially Twitter, as fertile ground for empirical analysis of social phenomena. Social media provides researchers access to trace data of interactions and discourse that once went unrecorded in the offline world. Researchers have sought to use these data to explain social phenomena both particular to social media and applicable to the broader social world. This paper offers a minireview of Twitter-based research on political crowd behavior. This literature offers insight into particular social phenomena on Twitter, but often fails to use standardized methods that permit interpretation beyond individual studies. Moreover, the literature fails to ground methodologies and results in social or political theory, divorcing empirical research from the theory needed to interpret it. Rather, papers focus primarily on methodological innovations for social media analyses, but these too often fail to sufficiently demonstrate the validity of such methodologies. This minireview considers a small number of selected papers; we analyze their (often lack of) theoretical approaches, review their methodological innovations, and offer suggestions as to the relevance of their results for political scientists and sociologists.