Understanding the political representativeness of Twitter users

In this article we analyze the structure and content of the political conversations that took place through the micro-blogging platform Twitter in the context of the 2011 Spanish legislative elections and the 2012 US presidential elections. Using a unique database of nearly 70 million tweets collected during both election campaigns, we find that Twitter replicates most of the existing inequalities in public political exchanges. Twitter users who write about politics tend to be male, to live in urban areas, and to have extreme ideological preferences. Our results have important implications for future research on the relationship between social media and politics, since they highlight the need to correct for potential biases derived from these sources of inequality. ∗Pablo Barberá (www.pablobarbera.com) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University. He can be reached at [email protected]. †Gonzalo Rivero (griverorz.net) is a Senior Analyst at YouGov. He can be reached at [email protected].