Analysis: Research shows Twitter may have caused polarisation of ideas in such a controversial environment and made debate and discussion challenging
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Irish same-sex marriage referendum. In 2015 Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour (62%) of the legalisation of the marriage between people of the same sex in the referendum with one of the highest turnouts (60.52% of voters) in the country to date. As a result, Ireland made headlines all around the world for being the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, which is a notable achievement given that Irish laws maintained a criminal ban on homosexual acts until as late as 1993.
Campaigns were hugely facilitated by social media at the time. Twitter (as it was named at the time) was the second most popular social-media platform in Ireland in terms of regular usage and communication in 2015, and it played a crucial role on popularising the discussion around the referendum.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Archives, RTÉ News report on reaction to the marriage equality referendum in 2015
But research from the University of Limerick reveals that Twitter may cause polarisation of ideas in such a controversial environment. Polarisation is a self-reinforcing system where users tend to talk to others that share the same opinions much more frequently than to whom share opposite ideas, which can cause information to become 'trapped', making debate challenging.
Lately in the news, we have seen social media appeals turning into actions. When polarisation increases radical thoughts, it can be dangerous. For example, the Labour Party were forced to switch locations earlier this week for an event marking 10 years of marriage equality due to a threat of a far-right protest in the vicinity of the original venue. This sheds light on the importance of understanding the dynamics of communication through social media, as social media has been playing a huge role in shaping people’s opinion and in increasing distancing and estrangement among groups of people that have different opinions.
Our research shows a clear distance between users who supported a ‘yes’ vote and the users who supported a ‘no’ in the same-sex referendum. Importantly, it shows that a tweet that originated in the yes-voting group would rarely spread to the group voting no, and vice-versa, which makes it challenging for people with opposite ideas to hear each other.
For the study, the team collected 499,642 tweets around the same-sex referendum posted by 144,007 unique users to build a conversation network from users’ mentions and analysed the sentiment contained in those tweets. From this network, community detection methods allowed to isolate yes- or no-aligned supporters with a high degree of accuracy.
A follow-up study by the same research team analysed the dynamics of conversation and opinion share on Twitter around the abortion referendum of 2018 and the same-sex marriage referendum of 2015. This follow-up study found that very little information spread between polarised communities.
Indeed, information tends to spread heavily inside the same ideological community and less frequently between communities. This means that users tend to communicate mainly with those with whom they share an ideology and less with people who have opposing opinions.
It may feel comforting to find people in the community that think similarly to us and to have our own point of view built upon. However, this research suggests it is important to raise awareness about the potential harm that polarisation in social media may cause in increasing the distancing between groups that have opposing ideas, and not allowing a healthy debate between these groups.
Dr David JP O'Sullivan and Dr Pádraig MacCarron also collaborated on this research project.
Follow RTÉ Brainstorm on WhatsApp and Instagram for more stories and updates
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ.
