#Commoncore Part 1
Prologue
Fueled by impassioned social media activists, the Common Core State Standards have been a persistent flashpoint in the debate over the direction of American education. In this innovative and interactive website we explore the Common Core debate on Twitter. Using a distinctive combination of social network analyses and psychological investigations we reveal both the underlying social structure of the conversation and the motivations of the participants. The central question guiding our investigation is: How are social media-enabled social networks changing the discourse in American politics that produces and sustains social policy? To see how the site is organized, click HOW TO USE THIS SITE.
About the #commoncore Project
In the #commoncore Project, authors Jonathan Supovitz, Alan Daly, Miguel del Fresno and Christian Kolouch examine the intense debate surrounding the Common Core State Standards education reform as it played out on Twitter. The Common Core, one of the major education policy initiatives of the early 21st century, sought to strengthen education systems across the United States through a set of specific and challenging education standards. Once enjoying bipartisan support, the controversial standards have become the epicenter of a heated national debate about this approach to educational improvement. By studying the Twitter conversation surrounding the Common Core, we shed light on the ways that social media-enabled social networks are influencing the political discourse that, in turn, produces public policy.
The Rise of Social Media-Enabled Social Networks
We live amidst an increasingly dense, technology-fueled network of social interactions that connects us to people, information, ideas, and events, which inform and shape our understanding of the world around us. In the last decade, technology has enabled an exponential growth in these social networks. Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are engines of a massive communication system in which a single idea can be shared with thousands of people in an instant.
Twitter, in particular, represents a compelling resource because it has become a kind of “central nervous system” of the Internet, connecting politicians, journalists, advocacy groups, professionals, and the general public in the same social space. Twitter users can share a variety of media, including news, opinions, web links, and conversations in a publicly accessible forum.
In this project, we use data from Twitter to analyze the intense debate surrounding the Common Core. The standards have consistently generated a high volume of activity on Twitter. Hashtags (#) are used on Twitter to mark keywords or topics of interest to users, and hashtags related to the Common Core – in particular, #commoncore, #ccss, and #stopcommoncore (the three from which we drew our analyses) – have consistently generated 30,000-50,000 tweets a month. While topics tend to trend and fall on Twitter, debate using these three hashtags has consistently maintained this volume of activity over the 32 months from September 2013 through April 2016.
Social Network Analysis Makes the Invisible Visible
To understand the Common Core network and the discussion coursing through it, our research combines social network analysis and linguistic analysis to produce a distinctive combination of lenses that allow us to examine the debate both from the outside in and from the inside out. Pairing social network analysis and linguistic analysis gives us a unique vantage point to gain insight into the ways in which social media-enabled social networks are producing and disseminating the political discourse that influences public policy.
The powerful thing about social network analysis is that it makes visible the patterns of communication in social networks that are otherwise invisible to either those interacting within the networks or to those observing them from the outside. Regardless of whether they are networks of neighbors talking across backyard fences, friend networks on Facebook, or professional networks in business, social networks are mostly invisible to the naked eye. Despite being unseen, the ideas, opinions, and information streaming through these networks can be very consequential, both in terms of the content and with whom it is being shared. These sources help form our beliefs and opinions, which form the basis for our convictions and subsequent actions.
Looking closely at the Common Core tweets using linguistic analysis is similarly revealing. By examining how participants articulate and frame the Common Core reform and related issues, how they craft metaphors to represent their views, and what lexical choices they make, we gain insight into the psychology which motivated their participation in the conversation. Linguistic analyses can provide a deeper understanding of participants’ underlying motivations, their levels of conviction, and even their state of mind. We can conduct linguistic analyses on individual tweets, the body of activity of particular actors, and even social groups, in order to better understand how interest groups build coalitions in the social media era.
How Our Story Is Organized

By investigating the Common Core debate through the lenses of both social network analysis and linguistic analysis, our project is based on almost 1 million tweets sent over two and a half years by about 190,000 distinct actors. This website is organized into a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue.
- The Prologue includes this overview of the project and our key findings, as well as brief primers on the evolution of media in politics, a short history of standards-based reform, an introduction to the theory of social capital upon which social network ideas are based, and an explanation of the way Twitter works.
- Act 1, The Giant Network, reveals the entire giant #commoncore social network on Twitter, made up of about 190,000 participants. Using cutting edge social network analytic techniques, which connect people based on their behavioral choices, we identified five distinct factions involved in the Twitter debate.
- Act 2, The Central Actors, disentangles the giant network and shows that most of the participants were casual contributors – almost 95% composed fewer than 10 tweets in any given six-month period. Focusing on the most prolific actors, we found that opponents of the Common Core from outside of education came to account for more than 75% of the most active participants.
- Act 3, Key Events, identifies what was driving the major spikes in #commoncore-related Twitter activity. Some of the surges were based on real events, while others were driven by outright fake news stories. There was also a growing presence of a conservative grass-roots network, which used a customized tweeting robot to send messages from the Twitter accounts of thousands of assenting users, creating the impression that disconnected participants were spontaneously tweeting about the same topic when in fact they were part of a well-organized campaign.
- Act 4, Lexical Tendencies, employs innovative large-scale text mining techniques to analyze the linguistic tendencies of the Common Core factions. This analysis examined tweeters’ psychological moods, drives, levels of conviction, and thinking styles. Common Core supporters, for example, used words that reflected high levels of conviction, tended to use more achievement-oriented words, and used words that reflected an analytic thinking style. By contrast, opponents of the Common Core from outside of education used more affiliation-oriented language, words associated with a narrative thinking style, and words that reflected the lowest level of conviction.
- Act 5, The Tweet Machine, allows participants to feed tweets into the tweet machine to learn about different frames that Common Core opponents used to appeal to the values of particular subgroups. The government frame, for example, portrays the government as controlling children’s lives through the Common Core, an argument that raises the ire of conservatives who oppose government encroachment into citizens’ privacy. Using particular frames to tap into the values of different constituencies helps to explain how the Common Core developed a strong transpartisan coalition of opposition.
- The Epilogue, The Big Takeways, includes a summary of the major insights that come from both the social and psychological perspectives, and individual essays from each of the project’s authors, which each discuss some of the important implications of this work. These include Rewriting the Rules of Engagement by Jonathan Supovitz; The Social Side of Social Media by Alan J. Daly; Misinformation and Networks by Miguel del Fresno; and Common Ground on Uncommon Ground by Christian Kolouch.
Funding
This project received funding support from the Milken Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. The analyses, findings, and conclusions are the authors’ alone.
About the Authors
The creators of the #commoncore Project are:
- Jonathan Supovitz, the co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and a Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Alan Daly, the Chair of the Department of Education Studies and a Professor of Education at the University of California, San Diego.
- Miguel del Fresno, a lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid, Spain and a senior communication consultant and researcher.
- Christian Kolouch, a research specialist at Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Citation
Supovitz, J., Daly, A.J., del Fresno, M., & Kolouch, C. (2017). #commoncore Project. Retrieved from http://www.hashtagcommoncore.com.
The Evolution of Media in Politics
The role of the media in shaping political opinion has changed dramatically over the past 60 years, as the populace has grown both more sophisticated and more fragmented. Before World War II, radio and newspapers were the dominant forms of mass communication. Franklin Roosevelt's famous fireside chats were a central means of messaging, and newspaper circulations were at an all-time high. In the 1950s, researchers Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz observed that mass media influenced opinion leaders, who in turn influenced their followers, the general public.1 They called this process the two-step flow model to indicate that public opinion was developed through a cascading process.
As network television became more dominant in the 1960s and 70s, the three major networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—molded public perceptions to an unprecedented degree in what became known as agenda setting. In one famous study that was replicated many times, McCombs and Shaw demonstrated the overwhelming alignment between what residents in Chapel Hill, North Carolina thought were the most important election issues of the day and what the news media reported were the most important issues. 2 The public depended heavily on the three dominant networks to stay abreast of national and international news, and because of this, the media had tremendous influence in molding public opinion.
Proliferation of Media Outlets
With the advent of cable television in the 1980s, the proliferation of channels led to a fragmentation of audiences. Cable news, talk radio, and 24-hour all-news outlets competed for attention with increasingly brazen and partisan reporting. The wide array of available media choices increasingly caused audiences to fracture as people tended to avoid information that diverged from their worldview, instead seeking out information that was consistent with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs.3 In this context, it is not hard to see why many political scientists have argued that the expansion of available news sources has increased political polarization.4
In today’s media landscape, the Internet and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide even more opportunities for audiences to splinter as members with similar views have increasing access to each other. And there are some distinct differences between the media landscape at the end of the last century and the social media era we are in today. The growth of cable television in the 1980s and 1990s was still essentially unidirectional from “elites” to general audiences because of the content control of mass media and passive forms of viewing. Social media, however, allows members to actively voice their opinions and engage directly with each other.
Some researchers, including Valenzuela, Park, and Kee, view social media as a new opportunity for political participation, free flow of information, and broader democratic mobilization.5 Others, like Roodhouse, view social media sites as nothing more than discursive information flows and echo chambers where the fervent can shout with each other.6
Thus, Twitter is in many ways the perfect platform for examining the ways in which social media are influencing the Common Core conversation in the United States. Twitter is a free, online, and global communication network that combines elements of blogging, text messaging, and broadcasting. One of the most valuable aspects of Twitter is its evolving nature to be, "a media of intersection of every media and medium."7
References
- Lazarsfeld, P.F. & Katz, E. (1955). Personal influence. New York: Free Press.
- McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (2), 176-187.
- Mutz, D. C. (2006). Hearing the other side: Deliberative vs. participatory democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Bennett, W. L., & Iyengar, S. (2008). A new era of minimal effects? The changing foundations of political communication. Journal of Communication, 58(4), 707-731.
- Valenzuela, S., Park, N., & Kee, K. F. (2008). Lessons from Facebook: The effect of social network sites on college students’ social capital. In 9th International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, TX . Retrieved from https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2008/papers/Valenzuela.pdf
- Roodhouse, E. A. (2009). The voice from the base(ment): Stridency, referential structure, and partisan conformity in the political blogosphere. First Monday, 14 (9).
- Dorsey, J. (2012). “Twitter takes the pulse of the planet. It’s the intersection of every media & medium,” Twitter, November 15, 2012. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/TwitterAds/status/269129576318386177
The Recent History of Standards Reform in America
The Common Core State Standards set forth what students should know and be able to do in mathematics and English language arts at each grade level. The standards were developed at the behest of a group of organizations led by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The development of the Common Core began in 2009, but the standards are part of a history of several decades of education reform.
1980s: Focus on Minimum Competency Testing

In the 1980s, policymakers created a set of minimum competency tests, which they intended schools to use as a foundation for performance. The expectations codified in the tests focused on a set of basic skills that schools were expected to have all students meet. However, the basic expectations assessed through the minimum competency tests often became the aspirations for instruction. The important lesson from this era was that low expectations produced low performance.
1990s: Statewide Systemic Reform
The apparent "race to the bottom" phenomenon spurred by minimum competency testing led to an emphasis on high expectations. The systemic reform effort of the 1990s was built around three general principles. First, ambitious standards developed by each state would provide a set of targets of what students ought to know and be able to do at key grade junctures. Second, states measured progress toward standards by developing aligned assessments that combined rewards and sanctions for holding educators accountable to the standards. The third component was local flexibility in organizing capacity to determine how best to meet the academic expectations.1 This structure of clear goals (standards), measures (assessments), and incentives (accountability) at the state level, combined with implementation autonomy, fit with our historical conceptions of education as a local effort. This led each state to develop its own standards and assessment systems, which produced lots of variation in the quality and rigor of state educational systems across the country.
2000s: Test-Based Accountability
The 2000s gave rise to the era of test-based accountability in education. The 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act inaugurated an expansion of testing by requiring states that received federal funding to assess students in all grades between third and eighth, and one year in high school. NCLB pressed states to develop plans to have all schools make adequate yearly progress with a target of 100% proficiency by 2014—an endeavor that would prove to be impossible. The NCLB legislation also required states to disaggregate school results by subgroups, in an effort to prevent districts and schools from hiding disparities in performance within overall averages. This movement can be seen as an attempt to tighten the linkages in the theory of standards-based reform by increasing student performance expectations via high-stakes testing to hold schools accountable for meeting standards.
Research on schools pressed by test-based accountability showed both productive and unproductive responses. There was an increase in attention to tested subjects, a rise in test preparation behavior, more attention to students just at the cusp of passing the test, and greater attention to heretofore marginalized students.2
Some states also gamed the system by creating tests that most students could easily pass. There were also several cases of systematic cheating by educators in school districts and schools that made national headlines. The accountability emphasis of No Child Left Behind left many policymakers convinced that although pressure was important, we couldn't just squeeze higher performance out of the system—we had to build a structure to support it.
2010s: “Common Core State Standards”
This brings us to the present major reform initiative in the United States - the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS set forth what students should know and be able to do in mathematics and English language arts at each grade level from Kindergarten to 12th grade. In a remarkable moment of bi-partisanship, the CCSS were adopted by the legislatures in 46 states and the District of Columbia in 2010. Alaska, Texas, Virginia and Nebraska did not adopt the Common Core, preferring their own state standards. Minnesota adopted the Common Core ELA standards, but not those in mathematics. Since then, the CCSS have become remarkably political and several states have either backed away from the CCSS and/or the associated tests or are in the midst of heated discussions about their involvement with the CCSS.
The CCSS incorporate a number of lessons learned from the earlier standards-based reform movement. The new standards were named the "Common Core" because they were intended to eliminate the variation in the quality of state standards experienced in the past. The experience of the 1990s taught us that not all standards are equal. The new experiment with common state standards was done to avoid the previous problem of differing quality of standards and their accompanying student assessments. They were developed at the behest of the state governors and chief state school officers to avoid the charge of federal intrusion—which came nonetheless after the Obama administration advocated for the CCSS in the Race to the Top funding competition and provided the financing for the Common Core testing consortia. Similarly, the Common Core testing consortia of Smarter Balanced and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) were funded to create assessments aligned with the standards. Thus, there was a push for a uniform set of standards and the development of aligned assessments to build a more coherent system for educational improvement.
In sum, many factors led to the development of the Common Core State Standards. Ever since the Nation at Risk Report of 1983, which famously stated "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," we have felt our education system besieged.3 Flat longitudinal performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and middling performance on international comparative assessments like TIMSS and PISA has further perpetuated the belief that America needs a more rigorous education system to compete with other nations in the increasingly global economy. This middling performance is often partly attributed to the spiraling nature of what is taught in America's schools, a student experience that has been called "a mile wide and an inch deep."4

Thus, the Common Core represents the latest response to the challenge of educational improvement by incorporating the lessons learned from prior experiences with education reform. The minimum competency era taught us that we needed high expectations for all students. The state-wide systemic reform movement of the 1990s taught us that state-led standards and testing systems would produce too much variability in quality and alignment. The decade of experimentation with test-based accountability drove home the lesson that, while accountability pressure was important, we couldn’t just squeeze higher performance out of the system without a coherent infrastructure to support it. All these factors have led to the push for a more comprehensive system with a uniform set of standards and aligned assessments that would allow for consistency in an increasingly mobile society.
Ongoing Controversy Surrounding the Common Core
Since their bipartisan adoption in 2010, the CCSS have become increasingly controversial. A series of important events contributed to both the pace of implementation and policymaker and public perceptions of the CCSS. First, the severe economic recession of 2008 spurred the economic stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, which included funding for the Race to the Top (RTTT) competition in education. Forty-six of the 50 states submitted applications for RTTT (Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Vermont did not submit applications), which included a provision that states adopt rigorous standards, and eventually awarded over $4.1 billion to 19 states. This financial carrot heavily incented states to adopt the CCSS, but created an impression of Federal coercion.5
Second, by 2013, more than half the governors who were in office when their states adopted the standards (and who were members of the National Governors Association, a sponsor of the CCSS) were no longer in the governorship, loosening states’ commitment to the standards. There was also growing partisan resistance in several states about continuing to use the CCSS. In 2013, Republican legislators in 11 states introduced legislation to repeal adoption of the Common Core.6 In 2014, Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina backed out of the CCSS and several other states (including Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia) have modified their standards to replace the Common Core. Additionally, about half of the states have withdrawn from the associated Common Core aligned test consortia.
Third, as shown in the Education Next survey results, the CCSS have become increasingly unpopular and partisan. In 2012, 63% of respondents supported the CCSS. From 2013 to 2015, support declined from 65% to 49%. At the same time, while Democratic support remained in the low 60% range, Republican support declined 20 percentage points, from 57% to 37%. The ongoing controversy surrounding the CCSS provides both a backdrop and consequence of the activity on Twitter.

References
- Smith, M. S., & O'Day, J. A. (1991). Systemic school reform. In S. H. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.), The politics of curriculum and testing: The 1990 yearbook of the Politics of Education Association (pp. 233-267). New York: Falmer Press.
- Hamilton, L. (2003). Assessment as a policy tool. In Robert Floden, (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, 27, 25-68.
- Gardner, D. P., Larsen, Y. W., Baker, W., & Campbell, A. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
- Schmidt, W. H., McKnight, C. C., Houang, R. T., Wang, H., Wiley, D. E., Cogan, L. S., & Wolfe, R. G. (2001). Why schools matter: A cross-national comparison of curriculum and learning. The Jossey-Bass Education Series. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
- McDermott, K. A. (2012). "Interstate Governance of Standards and Testing." In Education Governance for the 21st Century, eds. Paul Manna and Patrick McGuinn. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. 130-55.
- McGuinn, P., & Supovitz, J. A. (2016). Parallel play in the education sandbox: The Common Core and the politics of transpartisan coalitions.
Theory of Social Capital
A Relational Perspective
This project is based on the fundamental idea that connections and ties between individuals create a larger network, and that this network is important to outcomes at both the individual and collective level. Ideas, opinions, and information that flow through these ties can be influential and impact behavior.
This is idea is grounded in social capital theory, which posits that individuals exist in a social structure of relationships. This structure of relationships facilitates or inhibits an individual's access to both physical and intellectual resources such as knowledge, ideas, and opinions. Social capital theorists consider the richness of a social network to be a key component of a group's social capital, which refers to the kinship, trust, and goodwill that provides a collective advantage to the community.1
Sociologist Robert Putnam has chronicled the social benefits of memberships in organizations such as churches, clubs, and more.2 He hypothesized that the benefits he observed were due to the connections that these groups offer to their members. In another famous example of the importance of social capital, Mark Granovetter found that extended ties even beyond one's tight-knit circle of friends helped people gain access to job opportunities.3
Historical Grounding
The most explicit and earliest network approach to society dates back to German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1915) who wrote, "Society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction," and the object of study "was no more and no less than the study of the patterning of interaction."4
Contemporary social network analysis was formalized in the 1930s with the work of Jacob Moreno, who studied runaway girls and argued that their behavior was influenced by the social links among them.5 Moreover, the girls themselves may not have been consciously aware of how their actions were socially influenced and how, ultimately, it was their position in a social network that may have affected the runaway behavior. This idea is still prominent today and has expanded to the idea that social influence can impact a host of behaviors—both consciously and unconsciously—from happiness to weight gain to access to career opportunities.

Moreno's sketch of the cabins of runaway girls.
Moreno’s early drawings of the cabins in which the runaway girls stayed and the relationships among the girls were some of the earliest depictions of social networks. The larger circles are cabins and the smaller circles depict the initials of runaway girls. The lines represent connections between girls. This was one of the earliest sociograms is an example of state-of-the-art infographics from the 1930s.
Thus, a core idea of the work running from Simmel to Moreno to Coleman to Putnam is the importance of social networks, which reflect the overall structure of small and large societal relationships. This idea comes with some basic assumptions.
Assumptions Underlying the Social Network Perspective
There are a few core theoretical underpinnings to a social network perspective including:
- Actors in a network are assumed to be interdependent rather than independent.
- Relationships are regarded as conduits for the exchange or flow of resources and influence.
- The robustness and structure of a network has influence on the resources that flow to and from an actor and across a network.
- Patterns of relationships present dynamic tensions as these patterns can act as both opportunities and constraints for individual and collective action.
This approach privileges the structure of relationships to hold more sway than the attributes of individual actors. For our work, we start with a structural perspective and then add individual attributes and perspectives. Let’s look a bit more into what a network can illuminate.
Comparing Formal and Informal Networks


One of the most interesting aspects of social networks is the ability to compare and contrast the formal structure of relationships—meaning how things are formally structured versus how people actually interact. Sometimes, formal professionals are less important in social networks while unofficial individuals are central. In this example, a central player (large red box) in the formal system (left) is at the top of the hierarchy, yet in the informal social structure (right) this actor is marginalized (average-size red dot). Social network analysis can sometimes make the invisible visible.
Networks are Everywhere
Networks are intuitive and show up in many aspects of our lives. They may be structural, like subway systems or computer connections, or social, like relationships with our friends, church members, sports teams, parent groups, or colleagues.
From a social network perspective, individuals or organizations can have relationships that are depicted by lines connecting them, called ties. These ties can be uni-directional (going in one direction or the other) or bi-directional. Ties that go out (i.e. are sent) from one actor to another are called out-ties and ties that come in (i.e. are received) are referred to as in-ties. Ties can sometimes be reciprocated. These can be seen in the informal social structure graphic above.
The size of the circle that represents each individual, called a node, reflects the magnitude of the resource of that individual or group. Some actors have more “importance” in the network, meaning they have more incoming or outgoing ties in comparison to others. Other actors are more peripheral and others are even entirely disconnected from the network (called isolates).
Central Actors
The major actors in a network are considered central because they have more connections than others. These individuals therefore amass disproportionately more resources through unique social links and, therefore, may have undue influence over a network.
Research suggests that these actors also have access to novel and diverse resources, allowing them the possibility to guide, control, and determine the flow of resources to others in a group.6 In this sense, they often disproportionately dominate what information and opinions get moved across a network.
In this project we are most interested in those individuals who occupy a central location in a network, as central actors have been shown to influence other actors and interactions in a social sphere. We are specifically interested in actors who transmit a high number of messages to central actors in the network. We call these individuals transmitters. We are also interested in those actors who both receive and relay a large number of messages to others in the network. We call these individuals transceivers. Both of these types of central actors are important in understanding how resources flow in a network.
Other Actors in the Network
Although our project focuses on central actors, it is also important to consider how those central actors may influence others in the network who are considered more peripheral. More peripheral actors are typically engaged in fewer interactions and, as such, may have limited access to resources and tend to have less influence over the larger network. The perspectives of peripheral or isolated actors may not be as readily spread across a network and information may take longer to make it their way.
References
- Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America's declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 68.
- Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 1360-1380.
- Simmel, G., quoted in Freeman, L.C. (2004). The development of social network analysis: A study in the sociology of science. Vancouver, BC: Empirical Press.
- Moreno, J. L. (1934). Who shall survive? Foundations of sociometry, group psychotherapy and sociodrama. New York: Beacon House.
- Daly, A .J., Finnigan, K, Jordan, S., Moolenaar, N. & Che, J. (2014). Misalignment and perverse incentives: Examining the role of district leaders as brokers in the use of research evidence. Educational Policy, 28(2), 145-174.
How Twitter Works
Founded in 2006, Twitter is one of the top 10 most-visited websites on the Internet, with over 313 million monthly active users worldwide.1 Twitter is often called a micro-blogging social network site, where users can sign up for free, display recognizable user profiles, share messages with those who chose to follow them, and receive the messages of those they follow. Twitter users are a special breed of communicators—they represent only 18% of Internet users and 14% of the overall adult population. According to Pew Research from 2014, they are more affluent, younger, and more ethnically diverse than the general population.2
Each Twitter message can contain not more than 140 characters, including spaces, which is exactly the number of characters in this sentence. While some view the brevity of tweets as a shortcoming of the medium, others view the minimal effort as an advantage.3 Additionally, given the concise nature of the medium, Twitter users get quite creative with the construction of their tweets, and often link people to other Internet locations, including articles, blogs, and other websites.
Communicating with Twitter
An important feature of Twitter is the way that the medium is designed for people to communicate. Twitter users can follow others on the medium, be followed, or have a reciprocal relationship.
Twitter users can send their messages in three ways. First, they can initiate messages, called tweets. Second, tweets can be further disseminated when recipients repost them through their account. This technique, called retweeting, refers to the verbatim forwarding of another user's tweet. A third type of messaging is a variant of tweeting and retweeting, called mentioning. Mentions include a reference to another Twitter user’s username, also called a handle, denoted by the use of the "@" symbol. Mentions can occur anywhere within a tweet, signaling attention to that particular Twitter user. All three of these approaches are powerful because they can introduce information to new audiences.4
Conversations are facilitated by preceding a tweet with the '@' sign and a user’s name (i.e. @BenFranklin). Such messages are not private, but can only be seen by those who have reciprocal relationships (i.e. are following and followed) by both the sender and receiver of the targeted tweet.
Hashtags
Twitter users employ the hash or pound sign (#) to identify, or tag, messages about a specific topic. Streams of tweets are searchable by hashtag, which is the basis for our research on the #commoncore.
Followers and following
An important distinction on Twitter is the directionality of messaging. Some users are primarily senders, or transmitters, of messages. These transmitters are influential if they have many followers who receive their messages. Some people, like celebrities and politicians, are transmitters who are followed by many people, but follow relatively few others.
Other Twitter users are primarily followers, or receivers, of messages. These followers are recipients of tweets, but do not post many tweets themselves.
Still other Twitter users are transceivers, both senders and receivers of messages. These individuals are the audience to some and the main attraction to others. These individuals gain their influence as conduits in the flow of information.
In our analyses, we are primarily interested in transmitters and transceivers.
Privacy
Twitter allows users to make their profiles private, meaning that only approved followers of a given account are able to read a person’s tweets. If not private, all tweets are open to public consumption, but when made private, only approved followers can view a person’s tweets.
Reciprocity
Twitter can be used in ways that are both uni-directional and bi-directional.
If two individuals follow each other, they both receive each others’ tweets. This creates a reciprocal relationship.
Information contained in Tweets
Tweets can be used to:
- Share information or news
- Express opinions
- Provide links to other web sources
- Carry a conversation
Another dimension to consider when studying the Twitterverse is the accuracy of the information that is disseminated. Because posts are self-policed, there is no external check on the veracity of data one receives on Twitter. A study of news headlines by Schmierback and Oeldorf-Hirsch found that headlines presented on Twitter were significantly less credible than the same headline on the news sites themselves.5 Other studies have shown that most Twitter messages regarding news events are accurate, but the medium is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally.6 In such an environment, the reputation of the sender of the message is a crucial component of its perceived credibility.
As Twitter Evolves
Twitter has become increasingly sophisticated as it adapts to its users and incorporates improvements. Among the many small tweaks made by Twitter and third-party developers, are an application called TweetDeck that helps people manage their Twitter accounts, a mute function to silence certain mentions, and a block button to prevent unwanted outsiders from seeing a person’s tweets. A third party application called Twitlonger lets people exceed the 140-character limit. Users can also now purchase “followers” in bulk, essentially phantom accounts reserved to the profile page, serving no other purpose than to cosmetically embellish a tweeter’s prowess.
In other ways, Twitter has been manipulated by the creation of tweetbots – automated programs designed to disseminate information at regulated intervals. Essentially, tweetbots are unmanned computer programs used to advertise products, articles, companies, and sometimes even ideas. Despite how this might aid in marketing, tweetbots (masquerading as individuals) create an environment susceptible to manipulation, inflated statistics, and disinformation. In many important respects, Twitter is an unregulated virtual world and the identity and authenticity of some participants is suspect. This is to say that users – and researchers – must approach the twitterverse with healthy skepticism. While the evolution of Twitter complicates our analyses, we have taken care to accommodate for their potential effects on our research.
References
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