PL EU: emoji, language games and political polarisation

Luxmoore, Sara ORCID: 0000-0002-9963-7487, Silva, Jonathan Cardoso ORCID: 0000-0002-9566-7400 and Ramaciotti, Pedro (2023) PL EU: emoji, language games and political polarisation. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 3558. 639 - 660. ISSN 1613-0073

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Abstract

Are emoji political? In an increasing body of research, emoji have variably been viewed as emotional data or personality identifiers. However, little attention has been paid to the social and political import of emoji. Using a dataset of politically active Twitter users in Poland, including 334 members of parliament and their 1,288,950 followers, we ask whether emoji are used for political self-representation, and discuss the implications for political identity formation and mobilisation online. Adapting a new method of ideal point estimation, we identify patterns in the employment of emoji in user Twitter bios across a latent political space computed from a Twitter following network. We find that emoji are used as stand-ins for o昀ffiine political symbols such as, and . Additionally, we find that the use of emoji without recognisable political meaning, such as,, and is contingent on a users estimated political ideal point. Users on the left are likelier to employ and, while those on the right are likelier to employ and . Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, we argue that this points to the use of emoji for communication of both political values and affect, and to the development of a new political language game of emoji.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3558/
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Authors
Divisions:	LSE Data Science Institute
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JA Political science (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Date Deposited:	15 Dec 2023 14:51
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2024 00:51
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121071

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