Does the Bernie Bro actually exist? Harvard scientist analyzes 6.8 million tweets and finds Sanders supporters are NOT more hostile to rivals than people who support other candidates
- A researcher from Harvard investigated 280,000 randomly selected Twitter followers from the top nine Democratic primary candidates
- He analyzed more than 6.8 million posts, which dated as far back as 2015
- Bernie Sanders supporters were no more likely to post ‘negative’ or ‘very negative’ comments than any other candidate’s supporters
The Bernie Bro is the specter hanging over the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, a freewheeling band of self-righteous Brooklynites ready to swarm their adversaries with snake emojis and personal insults at the first sign of disagreement.
Yet, according to new data from a Harvard researcher, the idea that Bernie Sanders supporters are more abusive or hostile than other candidate’s supporters isn’t actually true.
Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist, looked at the top nine Democratic primary candidates and downloaded the Twitter posts of a random selection of supporters from each.
In total, he collected 6.8 million tweets from around 280,000 accounts, dating back to 2015.
‘Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower,’ Winchell told Salon.
While Berne Sanders supporters are reputed to be more hostile and insulting than other candidates’ supporters, new data from Harvard researcher Jeff Winchell shows that they’re no more likely to post negative tweets than Biden or Warren fans
The results surprised Winchell, who says he assumed they would be more negative.
‘This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV,’ he said.
He used two different algorithms to analyze the text of the Twitter posts to distinguish what were categorized as either ‘negative’ or ‘very negative’ language.
He found that the likelihood a Sanders supporter would tweet a negative message was four percent, and the chances of posting a very negative message was two percent.
Winchell analyzed 6.8 million posts taken from 280,000 Twitter accounts dating back to 2015, and found that just two percent of Bernie Sanders supporters were likely to make ‘very negative’ posts, the same percentage as Warren, Biden, and Buttigieg supporters
The same probability held true whether the person supported Sanders, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg.
Winchell attributes the idea that Sanders supporters are uniquely more aggressive to the fact that he simply has more supporters online.
Sanders has nearly 18 million Twitter followers, while Warren has 8.2 million and Biden just 4.8 million.
‘People responding to hundreds of millions of people online tend to dehumanize others,’ Winchell said.
‘They remember that someone is female/male or follows some candidate or is of some race, but they frequently don’t pay attention to differentiate actions of one member of that group versus another.’
‘So rather than consider how frequently an individual of some group acts, they think of how frequently the group acts as a whole.’
‘If they interact with many more members of one group than another, that perception of the group is magnified by the number of members they see.’