Political Polarization on Twitter: User Networks from 2010 Midterm Elections

Three networks of political communication between Twitter users were sampled from the public Twitter streaming API. The data was collected over a six-week period prior to the 2010 U.S. Congressional midterm elections. It was created by researchers including Michael Conover of Indiana University Bloomington for a 2011 ICWSM conference paper.

Use Cases

• Analyze political polarization based on user interaction networks mentioned in the description
• Study the structure of political communication networks on social media
• Model information diffusion and echo chambers based on sampled public tweets
• Benchmark community detection algorithms on real-world political networks

Strengths

• Data is explicitly linked to a peer-reviewed academic publication (ICWSM 2011)
• Collection time range is specified as six weeks prior to a major political event
• Data source is specified as the public Twitter streaming API

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified

Provenance

Source

Sampled public tweets from Twitter streaming API

Collection Method

Sampling from a public API stream

Time Range

Six weeks prior to the 2010 U.S. Congressional midterm elections