Breaking the Communities: Characterizing community changing users using text mining and graph machine learning on Twitter

TL;DR

This paper develops a machine learning framework to identify and characterize Twitter users who break their ideological communities, revealing that these users tend to have low PageRank and specific discussion topics, which has implications for social polarization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining text mining and graph machine learning to detect and analyze community-changing users on Twitter, with a focus on political polarization.

Findings

Community breakers have low PageRank scores.

They discuss specific topics different from their original communities.

The framework effectively classifies users who switch communities.

Abstract

Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities. This environment has real consequences with great impact on our lives like severe political polarization, easy spread of fake news, political extremism, hate groups and the lack of enriching debates, among others. Therefore, encouraging conversations between different groups of users and breaking the closed community is of importance for healthy societies. In this paper, we characterize and study users who break their community on Twitter using natural language processing techniques and graph machine learning algorithms. In particular, we collected 9 million Twitter messages from 1.5 million users and constructed the retweet networks. We identified their communities and topics of discussion associated to them. With this data, we present a machine learning framework for social media users classification which detects "community breakers", i.e. users that swing from their closed community to another one. A feature importance analysis in three Twitter polarized political datasets showed that these users have low values of PageRank, suggesting that changes are driven because their messages have no response in their communities. This methodology also allowed us to identify their specific topics of interest, providing a fully characterization of this kind of users.