Yani Kartalis (ICS), “Who breaks the ‘Spiral of Silence’? Users’ personality behind social networking ties of political expression in Spain” (6th April, 2017)

Yani presented a paper on political expression on social media. Here’s the abstract:

Studies have indicated the importance of Social Media in modern day politics. Participation in the online political deliberation process is becoming a vital part of forming and manipulating offline opinions and behaviors. Yet, little is known about what kind of people decide to participate and voice political opinions in online contexts. In this study, by creating a unique database through the use of a natural language processing approach, I demonstrate that the personality of the user plays a crucial role. Using Twitter’s API access methods I crawled the accounts of three different kinds of users, namely political science students, random users and politicians. Building on the existing literature on machine learning techniques, I used their social media textual footprints to identify personality effects on the decision to participate and express political views in Social Networking Sites. The results confirmed the relevance of personality and identified individual effects of each personality trait according to the Big 5 personality model. More importantly however, the study adds to the increasing number of scientific efforts that demonstrate the possibilities of automated data collection techniques as a valid tool for designing future research.