Distorting Political Communication: The Effect of Hyperactive Users in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are used increasingly for political purposes. Among others, politicians externalize their views on issues, and users respond to them, initiating political discussions. Part of the discussions are shaped by hyperactive users. These are users that are over-proportionally active in relation to the mean. In this paper, we define the hyperactive user on the social media platform Facebook, both theoretically and mathematically. We apply a geometric topic modelling algorithm (GTM) on German political parties' posts and user comments to identify the topics discussed. We prove that hyperactive users have a significant role in the political discourse: They become opinion leaders, as well as set the content of discussions, thus creating an alternate picture of the public opinion. Given that, we discuss the dangers of replicating the specific bias by statistical and deep learning algorithms, which are used widely for recommendation systems and the profiling of OSN users.