benghaziinfourwords

#BenghaziInFourWords and the Twitter echo chamber

The president went huff and puff.

Obama dismisses criticism of Benghazi talking points as "side show"

A frustrated President Obama on Monday dismissed new questions surrounding the White House role in producing a set of public talking points after the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, calling the debate around them a politically motivated “side show.”
“We don’t have time to keep playing these political games in Washington,” Obama said, arguing that the more important work is ensuring that U.S. diplomats are adequately protected. “We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.” (The Washington Post, 5/15/2013)

There was also a lot of huff and puff on Twitter, and one source of the flow of communication about Benghazi was #Benghaziinfourwords.

#Benghaziinfourwords is a standard word game played by Twitter users. The form is a phrase, often a hashtag, that begins the 140 characters followed by the creative imagination of anyone playing the game. The game does not usually show up in political communication, but politics became central to a game in 2010 in which one only had to fill in a name. (Boynton, 2010)

If I had a gun with 2 bullets and was in the room with Bin Laden, Hitler, and xxx I would shoot xxx twice.

The imagination is filling in the xxx. Who would you rather shoot than the two horrors of western civilization of the past 70 years. The most frequent answer was Toby of Office fame. Two political figures were the foil for that modest bit of creativity. A second was started with #ScariestWordsEver. The most popular was "you're pregnant," which is a pretty straightforward indication of the people playing the game. But the political version was "President Palin." (Boynton, 2011)

Ordinarily the games are played for humor. The challenge is to be the funniest. But humor was hard to find in #Benghaziinfourwords.

Hillary Lied, Americans Died. #BenghaziInFourWords"
#BenghaziInFourWords Republicans Cheered Sequester Cuts http://t.co/z9Ogjtd3OX

It was largely a partisan blame game. One could count the partisan distribution, but that is not the point to be learned here. Also apparent is the extent to which this is a self-contained/closed communication stream. Exploring what this means is the object of this analysis.

Twitter began as a broadcast-subscription medium. One could write a note of up to 140 characters, post it to Twitter, and Twitter would send it to followers who, in effect, had subscribed to receive the Twitter messages. Broadcast-subscription was not enough for users of the service and they invented conventions and technologies that would facilitate interaction within the stream. One technology that was invented to permit bringing outside sources into the stream of messages was the shortened url. Users wanted to refer to external online sources. A url was the obvious way to do that, but urls are generally many characters and some contain more than 140 characters. To reduce the number of characters required to refer to external sources a technology for constructing a 'path' from a few characters to many characters was invented. Initially there were a number of firms producing the shortened urls. The point was to make it possible to refer to external sources with only a few characters. Eventually Twitter began supplying this service with the format http://t.co/[characters].

The shortened url has been important in political communication using Twitter. Generally, streams of Twitter messages about politics include shortened urls in forty to sixty percent of the tweets. For the most thorough review of streams of Twitter messages in 2009 and 2010 see Politics Moves to Twitter: How Big is Big and Other Such Distributions (Boynton, 2010). For coverage of 2011 and 2012 see Retweeting Politics (Boynton et. al, 2013). Forty to sixty percent is far greater than is standard for the entire Twitter stream.

The stream #Benghaziinfourwords has just under five percent of the messages containing shortened urls. It sets a lower bound on inclusion of shortened urls, and an upper bound on a stream that is almost wholly self contained. External sources are an unusually small part of the communication in this stream of messages with 5% instead of 40% to 60%. There is plenty of interaction within this stream, however. Just over 50% are retweets. That involves a lot of reading messages from others and passing them along to one's followers.

One of the standard characterizations of communication on Twitter and other social media is that they are only echo chambers. That is the contemporary colloquial version of long standing scholarly research and theorizing about agenda setting. The interest in agenda setting began as early as Walter Lippman, became an important strand of research with the work of McCombs and Shaw (1972) and research continues to this day. We learn what is important from mainstream media, and that is what we tell pollsters is important and what we communicate about. Twitter messages were not available when most of that research was conducted since Twitter did not exist. But the expectation of an agenda setting version of echo chamber would be a high level of reference to mainstream media as users called attention to subjects focused on by the media. But that is not the case for #Benghaziinfourwords.

#Benghaziinfourwords is best characterized as: 1) there is no new here as there are virtually no references to 'news,' 2) there is a considerable amount of reverberation in the form of 50%+ retweets. This is almost wholly expressive communication; communication expressing many points of view.

Context of events -- The first Twitter messages I captured were posted at 3:26 a.m. on May 12, 2013. That day 43,393 messages were captured (see note about the collection). The next day there were 7,166 tweets. On the 14th there were only 309, and they were down to 80 on the 15th. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had held a hearing on May 8, 2013. However, there are very few clear references to the hearing in the text of the messages. Issa, the chairman of the committee, appeared only 499 times in 50902 tweets. Committee only appeared 37 times. While that committee hearing may have prompted the stream of Twitter messages there is almost no apparent reference to the hearing.

An echo chamber is designed to add color and depth to the original sound, to enrich the sound that otherwise would be flat. Ancient cathedrals and contemporary concert halls are carefully designed to provide this echo. The sound is internally generated and reverberates/echoes through the enclosure.

That is a different version of echo chamber than the agenda setting version. In this stream, #Benghaziinfourwords, the 'sound' is internally generated; there are exceedingly few references to media sources. There are very few references to the biggest news event that preceded this stream. It is an 'enclosed' stream of communication where people are reading, writing, and the tweets are reverberating.

This is an identifiable pattern of communication: closed stream of messages, or few references to external sources, with a high level of retweeting. It could be called the Twitter echo chamber.

One necessary condition for this pattern is a collection of communicators who have well established views about the subject. That seems to be the case here. The attack on Benghazi happened on September 11, 2012. #Benghaziinfourwords happened in the middle of May, 2013. There was plenty of time to either forget or develop views of the event. Most of the mainstream media did not dwell on Benghazi; Fox News was the exception. But as the president's statement suggests, Republican politicians had found it a subject that riled up their constituency. The attention to Benghazi was not limited to Fox and Republican politicians. It was actively pursued on Twitter. For example, in February, 2013 #Benghazi twitter bombs were promoted in an effort to communicate to Republican politicians the concern of their constituents with the subsidiary effect of keeping that concern alive (Boynton, 3/15/2013). And that involved communication about many elements of the event and the subsequent actions of the Obama administration.

They were ready, but it takes more than that. It takes a spark initiate the stream. #Benghaziinfourwords was that spark. I cannot trace back to the first instance of the hashtag, but in Retweeting in big numbers I show how important the person, his or her practice and reputation, is for the hashtag to serve as a spark. (Boynton, 11/04/2011) And it takes a medium that will carry the spark. On Twitter the follower relationship augmented by retweeting spreads the word remarkably widely. (Boynton, 9/6/2012)

Prepared, a spark, and a medium of movement can produce the Twitter echo chamber.

Conclusion

Science is about patterns. It is discovering patterns, specifying them carefully, and looking for the underpinnings that make the pattern work. The Twitter echo chamber is a pattern. It is not a pattern that shows up very frequently in political communication, and that is an important part of the pattern. It is the unusually minimal reference to external sources that sets it apart from most Twitter communication about politics.

Twitter communication about politics is full of patterns waiting to be discovered. That is the challenge and the joy.

Note: the collection

Several websites indicate that #Benghaziinfourwords was a trending topic on Twitter beginning on May 12. Tweettrendings specifies it was a trending topic from 5/12/2013 2:05 AM to 5/13/2013 5:13 8:40 AM. (Tweettrendings) It appears that my collection, which begins at 3:26 AM on the 12th, covers much of the time it was trending and then after it was no longer trending also.

The collection was put together by ScraperWiki, which is a new web service. They say very little about their collection procedures. The information they provide is the information available from the Twitter Search API. The search API responds to requests with at most 1,500 tweets. ScraperWiki does not specify that they were accessing the Search API nor do they tell how frequently they submitted a search. I cannot know how complete this collection is given the information ScraperWiki provides. But it is undoubtedly a reasonable sample if not the entire set of tweets containing the hashtags. I say that because they want to sell their service, and you need to be able to tell prospective buyers that you produce a high quality collection.

References

Boynton, G. R. (2013) Retweeting Politics

Boynton, G. R. (3/15/2013) A moment in the constitution of social movements

Boynton, G. R. (9/6/2012) The reach of "This seat's taken"

Boynton, G. R. (11/04/2011) Retweeting in big numbers

Boynton, G. R. (2011) Now that's going viral: #ScariestWordsEver "President Palin"

Boynton, G. R. (6/2/2010) The Bin Laden Joke Stream

Boynton, G. R. (April, 2010) Politics Moves to Twitter: How Big is Big and Other Such Distributions

Londono, Ernesto and Karen DeYoung (5/8/3013) At Benghazi hearing, State Dept. officials challenge administration review of attacks, The Washington Post.

McCombs, Maxwell E.; Donald L. Shaw (1972). "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media". Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (2): 176

ScraperWiki https://beta.scraperwiki.com/

Tweettrendings, #BenghaziInFourWords

Wilson, Scott (5/15/2013) Obama dismisses criticism of Benghazi talking points as "side show", The Washington Post