Our group looked at Twitter data to analyze the conversational aftermath of the Capitol Riots. US politics are as divided as ever and partisanship is rampant. We aimed to gain an understanding of who was controlling the conversation regarding the riots on Twitter. Additionally, we focused on researching how the tweets were being distributed across the platform, who was interacting with the tweets, and types of interactions. We also looked into how partisanship affected these interactions, and framing effects as they were related to imagery dispersed over Twitter.
Significance
The Capitol Riots that unfolded on January 6, 2021, are a series of cataclysmic events in American history. The event was a marker of intense political divisions in the United States – fueled by conspiracy theories, polarized online discourse, and the imminent confirmation of Democratic nominee Joe Biden as next President of the United States. With 5 people confirmed dead, the significance of the events that occurred at the Capitol cannot be understated [5]. After a long challenging year, where Americans were dealing with coronavirus and mounting racial tensions, the Capitol riot revealed the stress weighing on the American psyche. Democrats and Republicans have many opposing views, and a divisive president made those differences even harsher. The Capitol Riots have become a symbol of the emotional turmoil that our country has been facing and the consequences of these disturbances. Thus, understanding how social media conveys the dialect about these riots produces meaningful insight into the dilemma our country faces.
In pursuing this project, we hope to get closer to understanding how conversation about political events is structured online, and how partisanship on Twitter affects those conversations. Especially in the wake of an event as major as the Capitol riots, we hope that patterns revealed in tweets following the event can be applied to past and future political events.
Our research questions are as follows:
Do the tweets and users in our corpus tend to skew more liberal or conservative in their ideology? How does this affect the conversation? Is their evidence of echo chambers?
How is the conversation itself structured? How is the media involved in the conversation?
What were some of the rhetorical strategies communicated by users? What kinds of images were individuals using online in connection with these events? What does that say about the framing of the events?
Audience
The audience we aim to present our data to is other researchers, as well as politically-interested individuals. We include reporters, academic researchers, and social media analysts, as well, in our audience. We hope that the data and findings we have provided can guide the conversation about the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
