Integrating surveys and social media to better understand the dynamics of public opinion

Abstract

Our study investigates the impact of social media on survey outcomes, particularly focusing on how the general public’s perception of issue importance is influenced by Twitter. To accomplish this, we propose two case studies in Swiss politics focusing on social media’s effect on opinion change during elections and the similarities in arguments on social media and in survey data during direct democracy votes. This study relies on a two-year longitudinal data collection of tweets (from January 2019 to December 2020) sent by more than 50.000 identified Swiss seed users and their most active followers. We find that the content of tweets surrounding popular votes reflects similar arguments as those expressed by a representative survey sample. Cases without congruence can be explained by the groups of users dominating social media discussions about the votes but also by the complexity and variety of arguments surrounding the votes. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that the salience of policy issues on social media has no systematic effect on public opinion change regarding the perceived importance of similar issues, as social media’s impact strongly depends on the content and on the tweet’s author. These results provide valuable insights for researchers, helping them understand the circumstances in which social media data are most likely to be available and present a useful complement to surveys for understanding the dynamics of public opinion.