Twitter gives individuals the power to frame their news and opinions like never before. Politicians and leading influencers connect with their audience on a new level by sharing and framing issues in a personal way.

This is why Hillary Clinton’s Presidential launch included a tweet, but closer to home, the debates and discussion of the recent Marriage Equality Referendum in Ireland was one of the most popular topics on Twitter, both in Ireland and abroad.

However, among the fragmented discourse in a content-driven digital world, an ‘echo chamber’ effect can take hold. In a social media context, this means users insulate themselves among a following that reinforces their own views and opinions.

This is a psychological process relating to media selectivity; engaging in topics that reinforce our views rather than contradict them. This catalytic process plays a role in trending topics and the popularity of Memes in Internet culture.

This kind of social contagion is defined as “the spread of ideas, attitudes, or behaviour patterns in a group through imitation and conformity”. This effect is especially visible with the rise of social media in the last decade. While the homophily effect (think “birds of a feather flock together”) has a part to play, it’s clear that the role of social media is highly influential. Decisions are made by individuals shaped by their social environment, and social media now plays a role in that environment.

The knock-on effect of product sales through social media link sharing is a good example. A recommendation or invitation from a friend is more powerful than any sales technique. The power of one individual’s spend catalyses more spending amongst their peers. App developers have seen an increase of social contagion by over 400% (!) when an invitation feature is included in their interface.

Social norms are “implicit or explicit behavioural expectations or rules within a society or group of people”. Who we follow often falls in line with our pre-existing dispositions. So, not only are we already following people or pages of interest, but when a multitude of similarly framed opinions are shared, this can trigger the perception that these are social norms.

This process is closely related to cognitive dissonance reduction, a process whereby we change our attitude or belief to fall in line with our behaviour. We have a desire to keep a positive view of ourselves so when we perceive a social norm we often rationalise our beliefs to fall in line with it. Considering a lot of social media accounts are presented with the “best foot forward” i.e, how we’d like to visualise ourselves, social media can be used as a tool to implement this process.

We use our social media accounts to reinforce our self image thus retweeting posts that fall in line with our behaviour or thoughts helps us to do this. The knock on effect can lead to herd behaviour, as people base their decisions on information from other people, without doing the research themselves.

Another point to note is that humans get great pleasure from sharing personal insights. According to a Harvard study, it triggers the same sensation in the brain as food, money and sex. Being part of the millennial generation and growing up with social media gives greater inclination and opportunity to share.

Twitter trends in the Marriage Referendum

So how do these occurrences of social contagion, social norms and cognitive dissonance relate to real life policies and events? Twitter has furthered these circumstances through its engagement tools – ‘@mentions’, hashtags, and retweets.

Just look at the idea of activism through online engagement, known as clicktivism. Movements such as the Arab Spring are increasingly brought to light through online action and although it strengthens involvement and support, it blurs the line between meaningful actions and demonstrating support.

Trending hashtags for the marriage referendum included #MarRef, #voteyes, #voteno, #marriageequality and #yestolove among many others. Our own study showed #MarRef was used over 100,000 times during the last month alone. The Twitadox is how we relate to these shared opinions. Like-minded people mutually reinforce each other’s opinion.

In the case of the Marriage Referendum this lead to a perception that people who support the shared opinion vote the same way as you. Just as the yes side agree with their fellow yes-ers do the no side agree with their fellow no-sayers. We get a tunnel-vision glimpse into our own perceived reality which we lay out for ourselves by engaging with topics of interest to us, rather than those which we dislike.

The table below shows a breakdown of recent stats on use of #MarRef on social media, including by country, reach, and sentiment. To view the full report, simply click on the image to download.

Image: TinderPoint

To sum up, the Twitadox in the case of the Irish Marriage Referendum is that estimating voter sentiment from Twitter interactions is not a reliable metric due to the way in which we use the platform and the pre-dispositions which affect it. It is a fantastic resource for sharing our thoughts and encouraging discourse but using it to make assumptions about something which involves the whole population can backfire.

The fact that Twitter has a large demographic of under 30 year olds, while over 120,000 being under 25 year olds in Ireland are not registered to vote, leads to an experience where voter sentiment appeared to be strong with the Yes side and in reality packed the punch, encouraging more young people to vote.

The Socialnomics, i.e, the value created and shared via social media, has an influence on opinions and outcomes. What we can learn from this, is that developing real social value in a world inundated with opinions and content is only achieved through nurturing online communities and encouraging creativity and progressive debates.

Written by Siobhán Brosnan for TinderPoint
Editing by Scott De Buitléir

Update:
The following are stats on #MarRef between May 22 to 23, compiled by Twitter’s Dublin office: