Last week, an organization called Right Relevance, put out a fascinating post analyzing Twitter interactions surrounding the topic of GMOs during a single month - January 2017. I don't claim to fully understand all the methods they used or precisely how to interpret the figures they generated, but here's one of their conclusions:
“The retweets-only graph (Fig 2) is even more stark in bringing out the partisanship. It visualizes the echo-chamber like nature of the partisan groups. Also, it shows higher diversity and broader participation on the anti-GMO side.”
The go on to document and rank popular themes, topics, and individuals. I was a bit curious about the graphs, and even though I didn't recall tweeting much about GMOs in January of 2017, I though I saw my name in tiny font next to NYT Science in the above graph, so I emailed the author of the post asking for a higher resolution figure. Instead, they sent me the following two graphs focused specifically on my Twitter account (the second one I believe is only based on re-tweets).
I suppose I shouldn't be at all surprised to recognize most of the names in these figures since they're the same people I'm interacting with on Twitter. Still, there are many names I don't recognize but who are apparently in my "network". I'm not sure whether I should be frustrated that my Twitter network on this topic isn't bigger and more diverse or just be thankful for the network I have. It would also be interesting to see these same figures at different points in time. From personal experience, I can tell you that when I've had articles on GMOs in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I get a lot of people tweeting at me that have widely opposing views.
