🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how linguistic complexity in social media posts by influential users is shaped by four dimensions—account type (individual vs. institutional), political orientation (extreme vs. moderate), source credibility (high vs. low), and sentiment valence (positive vs. negative)—during high-stakes contentious events (COVID-19, COP26, Russia–Ukraine war). Employing a multi-dimensional textual complexity quantification framework, we conduct a systematic cross-platform analysis of authoritative accounts’ corpora. Results reveal that political polarization and negative sentiment significantly reduce syntactic and lexical complexity; high-credibility sources and institutional accounts consistently employ more advanced terminology; and ideologically aligned groups exhibit convergence in linguistic complexity. Crucially, this work provides the first empirical evidence that ideology systematically shapes online public discourse architecture via semantic selection and syntactic simplification mechanisms—offering foundational linguistic evidence for modeling digital opinion dynamics.
📝 Abstract
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with social media emerging as a pivotal force that merges entertainment-driven content with complex social dynamics. As these platforms reshape public discourse, analyzing the linguistic features of user-generated content is essential to understanding their broader societal impact. In this paper, we examine the linguistic complexity of content produced by influential users on Twitter across three globally significant and contested topics: COVID-19, COP26, and the Russia-Ukraine war. By combining multiple measures of textual complexity, we assess how language use varies along four key dimensions: account type, political leaning, content reliability, and sentiment. Our analysis reveals significant differences across all four axes, including variations in language complexity between individuals and organizations, between profiles with sided versus moderate political views, and between those associated with higher versus lower reliability scores. Additionally, profiles producing more negative and offensive content tend to use more complex language, with users sharing similar political stances and reliability levels converging toward a common jargon. Our findings offer new insights into the sociolinguistic dynamics of digital platforms and contribute to a deeper understanding of how language reflects ideological and social structures in online spaces.