September 29, 2024

Skylight Webzine

Online since 2000

Democrats and Republicans both support Metallica!


With the 2014 midterm elections approaching, Facebook decided to take a look at the cultural similarities and differences between people who support Democrats and people who support Republicans. To do this, they looked at everyone who liked the campaign page of any Democrat or Republican running for governor, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. They then looked at what other pages those people liked on Facebook and identified the pages that were most differentiating—that is, the pages which were disproportionately liked by the supporters of one party versus the other—and those that were most balanced.
Note: in the figure below, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Republican candidates, the farther right the page name appears (precisely indicated by the darker line in the middle). Conversely, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Democratic candidates, the farther left the page name appears. The font size of the name is proportional to the total number of people from the US who liked that page.

 


This figure shows the top 20 bands disproportionately liked by Democrats and Republicans and the top 20 bands that bridge the divide.

 

 

 

Source: Facebook Data Science