2020 U.S. presidential election in swing states: Gender differences in Twitter conversations
This addresses the gap in considering gender in social media election analysis for researchers and politicians, though it is incremental by applying existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed over 300,000 tweets from the 2020 U.S. presidential election to compare topic weights between female and male users, finding significant differences in more than 70% of topics such as tax, climate change, and COVID-19.
Social media is commonly used by the public during election campaigns to express their opinions regarding different issues. Among various social media channels, Twitter provides an efficient platform for researchers and politicians to explore public opinion regarding a wide range of topics such as the economy and foreign policy. Current literature mainly focuses on analyzing the content of tweets without considering the gender of users. This research collects and analyzes a large number of tweets and uses computational, human coding, and statistical analyses to identify topics in more than 300,000 tweets posted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and to compare female and male users regarding the average weight of the discussed topics. Our findings are based upon a wide range of topics, such as tax, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of the topics, there exists a significant difference between female and male users for more than 70% of topics.