Title:

Cultural Bridges: Combining Social Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Explain how Social Media Posts go Viral

Speaker:

Christopher Bail, Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor, Duke University

Talk Abstract:

Social media sites are rapidly becoming one of the most important forums for public deliberation about advocacy issues. However, social scientists have not explained why some advocacy organizations produce social media messages that inspire far-ranging conversation among social media users, whereas the vast majority of them receive little or no attention. I argue that advocacy organizations are more likely to inspire comments from new social media audiences if they create “cultural bridges,” or produce messages that combine conversational themes within an advocacy field that are seldom discussed together. I use natural language processing, network analysis, and a social media application to analyze how cultural bridges shaped public discourse about autism spectrum disorders on Facebook over the course of 1.5 years, controlling for various characteristics of advocacy organizations, their social media audiences, and the broader social context in which they interact. I show that organizations that create substantial cultural bridges provoke 2.52 times more comments about their messages from new social media users than those that do not, controlling for these factors. This study thus offers a theory of cultural messaging and public deliberation and computational techniques for text analysis and application-based survey research.

Speaker Bio:

Chris Bail is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University. He is an internationally recognized leader in the study of political extremism as well as the emerging field of computational social science. Bail’s work tracks the growth of political extremism by developing new quantitative techniques to analyze the rapidly increasing amount of textual data available from social media sites and other digital sources as well as field experiments. His research has been published by Princeton University Press, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Public Health, American Sociological Review, and other leading journals. In 2017, he was one of thirty scholars worldwide honored by an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Google, and Amazon, among others. Bail regularly presents his work to policy makers and public audiences. He was recently invited to present the findings of his book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream to the 2016 Democratic National Convention as well as the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America—the largest Muslim organization in the United States. His research has also been featured in major media outlets such as NBC News, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post. Prior to joining Duke University Bail was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2011.

Further Reading:

Bail, Christopher A. 2016. "Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Advocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:42 11823-11828

Live Stream:

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