Mapping social media networks of political actors and understanding the flow of information through them from elites to the wider public

In an information era, the role of social media on the spread and flow of information across the political
and social world is of increasing prevalence. More importantly, social media provides an open platform
for political actors to circumvent traditional forms of news and media outlets in order to spread their
message and ideology directly to the wider public. Naturally, it would be unfair to suggest that the media
environment has remained static throughout the modern period - new technologies like the T.V and the
radio have always created new platforms for information to be propagated - but social media presents an
entirely new revolution (Gainous & Wagner, 2013). To be specific, examining the age of social media
through the lens of Twitter, its logic seemingly favours political rhetoric that is simple and impulsive over
discourse with substance and forethought (Ott, 2017). There is no more pertinent example of this in
action than through the Tweet politics of President Trump: a study by Kries (2017) illustrating the way in
which he used an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to disseminate right-wing populist
discourse through his Twitter platform directly to the American public.
The purpose of this research proposal is to explore the ways in which this information flows from political
actors on social media through to the wider public, as well as measure the degree and direction of its
influence. Specifically, this project asks the question of how this top-down flow of information from social
networks is contributing to the growing ideological polarisation and political divide in the UK. The
association between the spread of populism and the use of social media by political actors has been
expressly examined by Engesser et al (2016): populism feeds on the freedom afforded to political actors
by social media to articulate their ideology openly and directly to the public, and without much oversight.
However, I feel that there remains much to be explored both regarding the spread of populist discourse
through social networks as well as the use of social media to accentuate the spread of other ideological
perspectives.
Potential Research Questions:
Given that this proposal is written for a pre-approved project put forward by the University of
Southampton, the project theme and research questions have largely already been set. However, I wish
to propose my own individual interpretation and approach to the project, along with some of the
questions I believe are important to answer:
- How does the spread of information from political actors to the wider public through social media differ
from traditional forms of media, and how significant is this difference?
- To what degree has a growth in the use of social media by political actors in the last decade contributed
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to increasing levels of ideological polarisation in the UK?
- How far does public opinion and perspective sway in relation to the political actors and groups that they
follow on social media?
- What, if any, are the differences between the way in which political actors from the ideological left use
social media to disseminate information to the wider public, compared to those on the right?
- Is the influence of using social media to disseminate information from elites to the wider public
overstated in comparison to the use of more traditional forms of media?