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Tweet Decay and the Politics of Deletion in the Brexit Debate

Bibliographic Data

ID3759335
AuthorsM Bastos (0000-0003-0480-1078, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume65
Issue5
Pages757-773
Publication date2021-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0002764221989772
OpenAlexW3083305429
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited21

Literature on influence operations has identified metrics that are indicative of social media manipulation, but few studies have explored the lifecycle of low-quality information. We contribute to this literature by reconstructing nearly 3 million messages posted by 1 million users in the last days of the Brexit referendum campaign. While previous studies have found that on average only 4% of tweets disappear, we found that 33% of the tweets leading up to the referendum vote are no longer available. Only about half of the most active accounts that tweeted the referendum continue to operate publicly, and 20% of all accounts are no longer active. We tested whether partisan content was more likely to disappear and found more messages from the Leave campaign that disappeared than the entire universe of tweets affiliated with the Remain campaign. We compare these results with an assorted set of 45 hashtags posted in the same period and find that political campaigns present much higher ratios of user and tweet decay. These results are validated by inspecting 2 million Brexit-related tweets posted over a period of nearly 4 years. The article concludes with an overview of these findings and recommendations for future research

Advertising · Brexit · Business · European union · International trade · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Quality (philosophy) · Referendum · Set (abstract data type) · Social media · Computer Science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Social Media and Politics

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