Tweets As Democratizing or Reinforcing Existing Inequalities?

Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, etc. have become more ubiquitous. Sociology is well-positioned to explore the power and influence of social media economically, politically, and socially. This paper is particularly interested in gauging the value of the Twitter community and whether tweets can be a democratizing force or usually reproducing current social hierarchies and inequalities. The social media website Twitter has been prominently associated with a diverse set of political movements in the recent past, such as the ‘Arab Spring’. This paper begins by presenting a review of the literature regarding Twitter and social inequalities. It uses tweet data from June-July 2013 to classify sentiments which are associated with agency and lack of agency to draw macro-conclusions of whether aggregated tweets can be seen as generally empowering or not as an overall corpus of text. The paper provides an empirical answer to Twitter’s role in influencing global inequalities, a claim often made in popular media. The paper ultimately concludes that though there are limitations in automated sentiment analysis, interesting patterns of perceived agency against inequality do emerge.