Thesis defense by Muhamad Umer Gurchani
Mr. Muhamad Umer Gurchani defended his thesis entitled "Political homophily and the role of retweeters on the French Twitter network" on Wednesday, September 29, 2021, at 1:00 p.m.
Abstract: In this thesis, I separated the French Twitter network from the global Twitter network and detected the community structure within this network in order to measure the evolution of homophily levels concerning community identities. I wanted to know whether being on Twitter and being part of a political community on Twitter encourages all types of communities to increasingly isolate themselves from other communities, thus making it difficult for the Twitter network to act as a "public sphere" in the Habermasian sense. Second, I wanted to examine the unique feature of "retweeting" on Twitter in order to investigate the identity of these retweeters and whether political retweeting can be considered a bridge between the elites and the masses, which would confirm the deeply hierarchical nature of the Twitter network and thus Habermas' notion of the "refeudalization of the public sphere." In this research, I discovered that the only group that has gradually diverged over time from the rest of the public sphere belongs to users with extreme nationalist values and generally belongs to political parties such as the National Rally and (certain groups of) The Republicans. The effect of presence on Twitter is therefore not uniform across all political groups. In the second part of the thesis, I took a close look at the role of political retweeting and discovered that retweeting in the case of Rassemblement National Twitter users is generally used for top-down ideological reinforcement rather than for disseminating ideas to the general public. This observation allows us to see that the isolation of a community from the global network can lead to the formation of clusters with high levels of ideological reinforcement, which also occurs in a top-down hierarchical manner.
Keywords: Twitter homophily, political polarization, retweeters, political echo chambers.
