[Colloq] Hiring Talk - "Someone is Wrong on the Internet": Political Argument as the Exchange of Conceptually Networked Ideas - Nick Beauchamp - April 9th, 3:30pm, CCNR

[Jessica Biron]

"Someone is Wrong on the Internet": Political Argument as the Exchange of Conceptually Networked Ideas 

Nick Beauchamp 



Tuesday, April 9 th 

3:30 pm - 4:45 pm 

CCNR – Dana Research Center – 5 th Floor (Please be sure to use the large elevator on the left side of the elevator bank to reach the 5 th floor) 



Abstract: 

Political opinion, and hence political behavior, is shaped largely via talk: with family, friends, and increasingly, online. But such discussions are often taken to be unstructured ideological posturing with little persuasive effect. This paper instead proposes a more deliberative model, where argument consists of the strategic exchange of topics, frames and ideas that are interconnected in a complex conceptual network. This network of ideas is inferred using new Bayesian topic modeling methods applied to a new dataset of millions of political discussions from the largest political forum online. By modeling arguments as a Markov process with the network as transition matrix, we can predict what topics arguers will deploy in response to each other: contrary to framing or expressive models of speech which predict that speakers will echo or ignore their interlocutor, this new model shows discussion to be more deliberative, where speakers offer ideas, facts, and topics relevant to, but missing from, what their interlocutor has said. In the longer term, panel vector autoregression methods reveal that a significant subset of users appear to change their views in response to what they hear, although listeners are biased against speech too unlike their own. Finally, because users can vote to recommend posts, factor analysis of this voting data reveals a strong underlying ideological dimension, largely centering (on this mainly Democratic forum) around criticism or praise of Obama. This ideological behavior is illuminated by the conceptual network: we see criticism of Obama largely based on left-wing policy issues, whereas praise is largely emotional and personal. This asymmetry is consistent with numerous psychological models of ideology, and also reveals which discussed topics may influence voting behavior in the long term. This text-based network of ideas allows us to model both the short-term dynamics of political argument and long-term opinion change, using a framework that is as rich, complex, and substantively interpretable as people have always claimed their arguments were. 



Biography: Nick Beauchamp (Ph.D., New York University, 2012) is a Lecturer in the Political Science Department and the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program at Columbia University. His research models political behavior, psychology, and speech using automated text analysis and social network analysis. His recent projects have examined ideology and legislative speech, campaign advertising effects, and Supreme Court decisions. After studying physics and philosophy at Yale, he received an MA in Literature from Johns Hopkins and subsequently worked in election observation and fraud analysis at The Carter Center. He is currently working on a book-length project on political argument and persuasion online. 




Jessica Biron 
Administrative Assistant – Office of the Dean and CCIS Development 
College of Computer and Information Science 
Northeastern University 
202 West Village H 
617-373-5204 
bironje at ccs.neu.edu 
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/