Modeling the debate dynamics of political communication in social media networks

•Diffusion of political content through social-media networks has unique dynamics.•We developed a transmission model for political content through social networks.•We simulated our model on a political-debate network of 169 K twitter users.•We found that even a low probability of rival responses can overtake the discussion.•Our work can aid campaigners in finding the optimal seed users in political domains. Social networks' ability to disseminate content to millions of users with just one click has made them a major playground for political marketing. Campaigners seek to identify a small subset of seed users in a social network to maximize the spread of influence. However, political content diffusion has a distinct nature —some users may invert a message's content before sending it onward, thereby propagating a view that contradicts the one held by the original author. Here, we developed a novel transmission model tailored to analyze the effect of debate dynamics in realistic settings of social networks. We demonstrate our model on a real-world network we developed based on a large-scale dataset of 715K tweets discussing active political content concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our simulations reveal that even a minute probability of tweet content inversion could result in the message being echoed, spread, and amplified by opposing users. The profile of the optimal seed users who would maximize exposure, too, drastically changes, and “echo chambers” are intensified compared to a no-inversion setting. Neglecting the effect of inversion may even result in a counterproductive outcome from the perspective of the original authors. Campaigners can significantly benefit from explicitly accounting for the impact of content inversion in social networks.