Abstract
The Internet has provided people with new ways of expressing not only their individuality but also their collectivity i.e., their group affiliations. These group identities are the shared sense of belonging to a group. Online contact with others who share the same group identity can lead to cooperation and, even, coordination of social action initiatives both online and offline. Such social actions may be for the purposes of positive change, e.g., the Arab Spring in 2010, or disruptive, e.g., the England Riots in 2011. Stylometry and authorship attribution research has shown that it is possible to distinguish individuals based on their online language. In contrast, this work proposes and evaluates a model to analyse group identities online based on textual conversations amongst groups. We argue that textual features make it possible to automatically distinguish between different group identities and detect whether group identities are salient (i.e., most prominent) in the context of a particular conversation. We show that the salience of group identities can be detected with 95% accuracy and group identities can be distinguished from others with 84% accuracy. We also identify the most relevant features that may enable mal-actors to manipulate the actions of online groups. This has major implications for tools and techniques to drive positive social actions online or safeguard society from disruptive initiatives. At the same time, it poses privacy challenges given the potential ability to persuade or dissuade large groups online to move from rhetoric to action.
Highlights
Global and national events over recent years have shown that online social media can be a force for good (e.g., Arab Spring in 2010) and harm
Distinguishing group identities: (a) Is it possible to distinguish between different group identities on the basis of textual features automatically extracted from conversations? (b) Is our analysis model generalizable to distinguish group identities over time and on different online social media? (c) Which features enable a specific group identity to be accurately predicted?
The model and results presented in this paper provide a stepping stone towards understanding how group identities and their salience manifest in text-based communications via online social media and the implications this holds regarding risk posed by external agents to influence collective action/inaction mediated by online social media
Summary
Global and national events over recent years have shown that online social media can be a force for good (e.g., Arab Spring in 2010) and harm (e.g., the England Riots in 2011) In both of these examples, social media played a key role in group formation and organisation, and in the coordination of the group’s subsequent collective actions (i.e., the move from rhetoric to action) (Halliday, 2011; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012). Such coordinated actions are possible because individuals identify themselves with a particular social group or with an ideal (Taylor, Whittier, & Morris, 1992) Online identity in such contexts is, not so much about the categorisation of the self as a singular “I”. Offline group identities are usually referred to as social identities by social identity theory (Deaux, 1996; Stryker & Burke, 2000; Tajfel, 2010),
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