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Rejecting the Null Hypothesis of Apathetic Retweeting of US Politicians and SPLC defined Hate Groups

215 views · Published 10 October 2018 · 27:04 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Databricks · 2018 · Science & Technology

Talk by: Raazesh Sainudiin
We characterize the Twitter networks of both major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with various American hate groups defined by the US Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). We further examined the Twitter networks for Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan, for 9 weeks around the 2016 election (4 weeks prior to the election and 4 weeks post-election).

By carefully accounting for the observed heterogeneity in the Twitter activity levels across individuals under the null hypothesis of apathetic retweeting that is formalized as a random network model based on the directed, multi-edged, self-looped, configuration model, our data revealed via a generalized Fisher’s exact test that there were significantly many Twitter accounts linked to SPLC-defined hate groups belonging to seven ideologies (Anti-Government, AntiImmigrant, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi, and White-Nationalist) and also to @realDonaldTrump relative to the accounts of the other four politicians.

The exact hypothesis test uses Apache Spark’s distributed sort and join algorithms to produce exact samples in a fully scalable way from the null model. Additionally, by exploring the empirical Twitter network we found that significantly more individuals had the fewest retweet degrees of separation simultaneously from Trump and each one of these seven hateful ideologies relative to the other four politicians. We conduct this exploration via a geometric model of the observed retweet network, distributed vertex programs in Spark’s GraphX library and a visual summary through neighbor joined population retweet ideological trees.

Remarkably, less than 5% of individuals had three or fewer retweet degrees of separation simultaneously from Trump and one of several hateful ideologies relative to the other four politicians. Taken together, these findings suggest that Trump may have indeed possessed unique appeal to individuals drawn to hateful ideologies, however such individuals constituted a small fraction of the sampled population.

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Rejecting the Null Hypothesis of Apathetic Retweeting of US Politicians and SPLC defined Hate Groups

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