Anees Baqir, assistant professor of data science, undertook research to find out what side of the argument the silent majority are on when it comes to the debate on military aid for Ukraine.
LONDON — When as many as 90% of people on social media are “lurkers,” how can we know what they are consuming?
A data scientist at Northeastern University in London was involved in a study recently, published by Nature’s Scientific Reports journal, to find out what type of material the lurkers — those who view social media but do not interact with posts — are viewing.
Assistant professor Anees Baqir says the idea came about because of a desire to discover if it was possible to find out what side of the debate the silent majority are on.
“If you take a hardcore stance in favor or against a particular topic, like on vaccines for example, you can be classified as pro or against that particular topic,” he says.
“Now the point is, if you don’t do that, how do we know for sure which side you are on? How do we know how you are being influenced? That was the initial idea — to find out how the users are being influenced when we don’t know how they are interacting or how they are voicing their concerns.
“If there is a protest outside, you will see all these people protesting for a cause. But it doesn’t mean that those who are sitting at home are not in favor or against the ideas of that particular group.”
Previous studies have estimated that lurkers constitute the majority of social network users, ranging from between 75% to 90% depending on the subject matter and platform.
Baqir, who led the recent study into lurker content consumption, said he and his academic colleagues used the “impressions count” metric that was made available on the social media platform Twitter (now X) in December 2022. It can be used to determine how many users are viewing a post, even if they are not commenting or sharing it with their followers.
“The idea was to somehow quantify what kind of content is being consumed by those users,” Baqir adds. “Because at the end of the day, any content that you consume, it might influence your choices.”
In the paper “Unveiling the drivers of active participation in social media discourse,” Baqir and a team of eight other researchers analyzed 17 million tweets by 5.2 million users relating to the debate around providing military aid to Ukraine in its battle against Russia’s invasion. The data was collected between November 2022 and March 2023.
They categorized users into pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine camps by determining what influencers, politicians and sources they were following on Twitter before studying how the different groups interacted with content, if at all. The dataset of pro-Ukraine tweets was eight times larger than the pro-Russia equivalent.
The study found that “active actions” — such as liking or retweeting a post — constitute a “smaller portion compared to the number of views,” indicating that “passive consumers account for a significant share of users who view the content.”
It is “very hard to know the exact reasoning” for why people do not actively engage with X/Twitter content, Baqir says, but there are some theories.
It could be that users do not want others to see what opinions or content they are subscribing to, particularly if it is a controversial ideology, he says.
Or potentially, the user wants to occasionally view some content on a particular topic but does not like it or otherwise engage with it to ensure their algorithm does not change to increase how much appears on their timeline. There is also a third theory, Baqir adds — maybe a user just doesn’t feel that strongly either way, so passively consumes rather than look to share or show appreciation.
The study, conducted by academics from across Europe — including researchers from Central European University in Austria, University of Padova in Italy and the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain — analyzed what type of content was more likely to spark engagement.
They discovered that multimedia content, particularly posts containing photos, had more chance of drawing a reaction from users. The same was the case for posts that contained misinformation or were deemed to be sharing information from “unreliable news sources.”
“That misinformation-based content,” Baqir continues, “tends to use emotional words or click bait, so that is why people tend to engage with it. They may even engage in order to oppose it.”
Another discovery was that the popularity of a user in terms of their follower count did not necessarily improve active engagement. In fact, very popular users and influencers seemed to experience a “slightly higher level of passive consumption,” Baqir says.
The fact that the results show that in both the pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia camps active participation increased when it related to posts associated with misinformation or “extremely biased news” rather than a user’s popularity suggests, according to the researchers, that the “level of active participation does not depend on the echo chamber where the content is generated.”
“Conversely,” they add in their paper, “our results imply that different communities experience similar levels of active consumption.”