Muhamad Umer Gurchani's thesis defense
Mr. Muhamad Umer Gurchani defended his thesis "Homophilie politique et rôle des retweeteurs sur le réseau Twitter français" on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 1:00 pm.
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 regarding community identities. I wanted to find out whether being on Twitter and being part of a political community on Twitter encourages all types of communities to become increasingly isolated from other communities, making it difficult for the Twitter network to act as a "public sphere" in the Habermasian sense. Secondly, I wanted to verify the unique characteristic of "retweeting" on Twitter in order to investigate the identity of these retweeters and whether political retweeting can be seen as a bridge between elites and masses, which will confirm the deeply hierarchical nature of the Twitter network and thus Habermas's notion of "refeudalization of the public sphere In this research, I discovered that the only group that has progressively distanced itself 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 Rassemblement National and (certain groups of) Les Républicains. The effect of Twitter presence is therefore not uniform across all political groups. In the second part of the thesis, I took a closer look at the role of political retweeting and found that retweeting in the case of Rassemblement National Twitter users is generally used for top-down ideological reinforcement rather than the dissemination of 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 takes place in a top-down hierarchical fashion.
Keywords: Twitter homophilia, Political polarization, Retweeters, Political echo chambers.
