Partisanship is on the rise within American political discourse. How does this effect the narrative surrounding the Capitol Riots?
This visualization lists the tweet text content of the top 100 tweets with text only in our corpus, as ordered by the ideological calculation. Human- annotated user categories (politics account, personal account, etc.) information is also included.
We encourage visitors to explore the content of this data visualization, and see how the inferred political ideology of given user can effect both the content and the rhetoric of their tweets. Looking at the macro patterns of the colored gradient tiles, it is clear that there is a higher proportion of Liberal text tweets (blue) compared to Conservative text tweets (red). Liberal User Tweets often harshly condemning the riots as a white nationalist coup attempt, and many attributed direct blame to President Trump. Moderate tweets are reporting the event, with some criticism. Some conservative Tweets also condemn the riots, but many offer alternative interpretations of the event: Some frame the event as a part of defending Democracy (the viral #STOPTHESTEAL tag is a shorthand for this view, ), while some users redirect the narrative by claiming that the left is hypocritical for not condemning the BLM ‘riots’ in the Summer of 2020 in the same manner.
Notice that the news category is a large proportion of this sub-corpus, especially within ideologically moderate tweets. This is congruent with our findings related to conversation structure: both new and legacy media outlets are influential on Twitter, especially when framing the conversation around such a newsworthy event. Moreover, news media outlets generally attempt to stay objective when covering events. However, on the more partisan extremes, politics, activism, and personal accounts are better represented.
This visualization presents the most partisan images from the most ideologically left and ideologically right users in a collage format, from the top 100 retweeted tweets containing images.
There are similarities between the textual rhetoric and visual rhetoric. On the left, Users are sharing some of the most visually shocking images of the capitol riots: one image shows a rioter with Speaker Nancy Peloski’s podium, waving to the camera. Another image shows a rioter waving a trump flag in a capitol staircase. Another image is of a list of people who attended the riots, likely a part of the effort to document and make those who attended the riots accountable. There are ‘memes’ being shared as well, demonstrating that, on the more ideologically extremes, there is less ‘objective’ news coverage of the events and more informal methods of sharing sentiments and ideas on the riots.
On the right, users are also sharing some of the memorable scenes from the capitol riots. But interestingly, many of the images being shared are scenes of rioting and destruction from the Summer 2020 BLM protests. These images are shared to accuse the media and the left of hypocrisy: When gatherings by BLM were violent, this was framed as a peaceful protest, but when the gathering is by Trump supporters, this is framed as a riot. This right-wing narrative, of course, ignores many of the nuances of the situation. In fact, there is a visual challenge of this right-wing narrative on the left: one of the images shared by an ideologically left user depicts a scene of peaceful protesters, visually communicating the idea that BLM was a largely peaceful protest movement focused on social justice and community activism/organization.
In all, our findings suggest there is not a unified national narrative for the events at the capitol. Both textual and visually, people on the left and (especially) on the right communicate criticism and claims of hypocrisy towards their political opponents.
