Social media is commonly used by the public during election campaigns to express their opinions regarding different issues. Among various social media channels, Twitter provides an efficient platform for researchers and politicians to explore public opinion regarding a wide range of topics such as economy and foreign policy. Current literature mainly focuses on analyzing the content of tweets without considering the gender of users. This research collects and analyzes a large number of tweets and uses computational, human coding, and statistical analyses to identify topics in more than 300,000 tweets posted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and to compare female and male users regarding the average weight of the topics. Our findings are based upon a wide range of topics, such as tax, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of the topics, there exists a significant difference between female and male users for more than 70% of topics. Our research approach can inform studies in the areas of informatics, politics, and communication, and it can be used by political campaigns to obtain a gender-based understanding of public opinion.
翻译:在各种社交媒体渠道中,Twitter为研究人员和政治家提供了一个有效平台,以探讨关于经济和外交政策等广泛议题的舆论。当前文献主要侧重于分析推文的内容,而不考虑用户的性别。这一研究收集并分析了大量推文,并使用计算、人类编码和统计分析等方法,在2020年美国总统选举期间公布的300 000多份推文中确定主题,比较男女用户对议题平均份量的比较。我们的调查结果基于一系列广泛的专题,如税收、气候变化和COVID-19大流行病。在这些专题中,70%以上的专题在男女用户之间存在巨大差异。我们的研究方法可以为信息学、政治和传播领域的研究提供信息,并可用于开展政治运动,以从性别角度了解公众舆论。