Bow-Tie Structures of Twitter Discursive Communities

TL;DR

This study reveals that Twitter discursive communities often form bow-tie structures during debates, with low-quality content prevalent in communities affected by misinformation, highlighting the infodemic phenomenon.

Contribution

It uncovers the widespread presence of bow-tie structures in Twitter communities across various topics and languages, and links community structure to content quality and misinformation exposure.

Findings

Bow-tie structures are common in Twitter discursive communities during debates.

Communities affected by misinformation tend to share lower-quality content.

Low-reputation messages are prevalent in retweet flows between community sectors.

Abstract

In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic Twitter datasets in various languages. Surprisingly, we observed that almost all discursive communities therein display a bow-tie structure during political or societal debates. Instead, they are absent when the argument of the discussion is different as sport events, as in the case of Euro2020 Turkish and Italian datasets. We furthermore analysed the quality of the content created in the various sectors of the different discursive communities, using the domain annotation from the fact-checking website Newsguard: we observe that, when the discursive community is affected by m/disinformation, the content with the lowest quality is the ones produced and shared in SCC and, in particular, a strong incidence of low- or non-reputable messages is present in the flow of retweets between the SCC and the OUT sectors. In this sense, in discursive communities affected by m/disinformation, the greatest part of the accounts has access to a great variety of contents, but whose quality is, in general, quite low; such a situation perfectly describes the phenomenon of infodemic, i.e. the access to "an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution", according to WHO).