CEDE Seminar - Tomás Rodríguez

In this paper we study the relationship between ideological segregation in Twitter and external events  in the context of the "estallido social" of 2021 in Colombia. We analyze the tweeting behavior of approximately 37,000 users active in political discussions during the two most intense months of the 2021 "estallido social" in Colombia, supplemented by event data from ACLED. Our findings reveal a significant increase in political segregation within daily weighted and directed re-tweet networks of right, left, and center groups during spikes in street violence. Notably, around critical days, defined as days with violent activity spikes over two standard deviations above the mean users exhibited a 20 to 30 percentage point increase in attention towards individuals of their own ideology, with a corresponding decrease in attention towards those of differing ideologies. This endogamic shift was most pronounced among right-wing users, followed by the left-wing users. Users from the political center and unclassified users showed a less pronounced shift in behavior. These changes were primarily driven by sporadic participants in Twitter conversations during critical periods, while regular re-tweeters in fact displayed an increase in exogamy during these times.