Liberals are more emotional on Twitter; conservatives are more religious
A study surveying a million tweets from about 10,700 Twitter users reveals that vocabulary and topic choices on the social network correlate with users' political leanings.
Democrats are prone to emotional language and swear words, and they're disproportionately angry about Dick Cheney and interested in international news, researchers at Queen Mary University of London found. Right-wing Twitter users, by contrast, speak often of religion — "God" and "Psalm" frequently popped up in their tweets — and vent their ire at Barack Obama and Democratic leadership in Congress.
Perhaps the most intriguing finding, given Republicans' emphasis on individual freedom, was the discovery that conservatives tend to speak in group terms ("we," and "us," for example) while liberals' language is more individualistic ("me," and "I").
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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