THE REVOLUTION WILL BE LIVE-TWEETED: POPULISM AND THE CHARACTER OF OUTSIDER INFLUENCER COMMUNITIES ON TWITTER

Abstract

Increasingly, young Americans are turning to influencers on social media for their news and political content. Across Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, Instagram, and other platforms, there are, conservatively, tens of millions of Americans who consume content from “political influencers.” Despite this development and a rich discourse on the role of social media in stoking populism, there is little in the literature assessing the rhetoric and potential populist color of these independent commentators. To address this lacuna I collect large datasets from Twitter, use a community detection algorithm to identify discrete clusters of creators based on shared followers, and implement topic modeling and sentiment analysis methods in order to assess the uniquely populist nature of outsider-influencers when compared to their establishment counterparts. I ultimately find that for both the ideological left and right, outsider networks of influencers can be robustly separated from establishment networks. Moreover, topical agendas and stylistic traits that I find associated with these groups are consistent with previous literature on the values and rhetoric of contemporary populist movements on the left and right respectively, suggesting that outsider influencers may have a greater propensity to espouse populism. In compiling this review of outsider political influencers, I uncover an under-discussed source of populism in contemporary American politics and shed light on the rhetorical characteristics that may continue to drive polarized populism. This research should serve as a basis for investigating the causal effects of political influencers on their followers’ political participation, specifically in the populist movements of the last several years.