(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01762
• Kenneth Josepth, Sarah Shugars, Ryan Gallagher, …, David Lazer

Belief, Belief network, Social media

Leveraging a longitudinal public opinion survey with respondent Twitter handles, we conducted this comparison for 1,129 individuals across four salient targets. We find that recall is high for both “Pro’’ and “Anti’’ stance classifications but precision is variable in a number of cases. We identify three factors leading to the disconnect between text and author stance: temporal inconsistencies, differences in constructs, and measurement errors from both survey respondents and annotators.