Effect of readability of political tweets on positive user engagement

Abstract

Twitter is one of the essential information environments where novel information join and diffuse through the public discourse via user engagement. Although the previous work has shed light on the role of the content in information diffusion, stylistic factors such as readability are still under-explored. We investigated the effect of the readability on positive user engagement for over 80,000 political tweets collected for a period of six months. We formulated a set of experiments involving the use of regression techniques to predict user engagement. Our findings indicate that the addition of the readability related features leads to more accurate and more robust predictions. Increase in the prediction robustness means that ease-of-read have a considerable influence on the positive engagement political tweets receive.