Political Influencers and Their Social Media Audiences during the 2021 Arizona Audit

Abstract

In this study, the authors explore the role of echo chambers in political polarization through a network and content analysis of 183 political influencer accounts and 3,000 audience accounts on Twitter (now X) around the Arizona audit of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, sampled between July 17 and August 5, 2021. The authors identify five distinct groups of influencers who shared followers, noting differences in the information they post and the followers they attract. The most ideologically diverse audiences belong to popular media organizations and reporters with localized expertise to Arizona, but partisan influencer groups and their audiences are not uniformly like-minded. Interestingly, conservative audiences are spread across multiple influencer groups varying in ideology, from liberal influencers and mainstream news outlets to conservative conspiracy theorists. The findings highlight the need to understand users’ motivations for seeking political information and suggest that the echo chamber issue may be overstated.