Actives audiences and income inequality: An exploratory analysis of the conversation on Twitter

The income inequality is one of the major challenges of our societies and one of the main topics on the recent political agenda (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015: 132), especially since the global financial collapse. As Mike Savage (2016) affirms, “inequality is everywhere: in the representations that the media makes of reality, as well as in our daily social life or in social networks”.

Paying attention to digitally mediated conversation, the research will focus on Twitter as a digital platform and social network used for set the topic in the digital public sphere.

Social media have the potential to facilitate more participative democracy and a disruptive value for challenging traditional interests and modes of communicative power (Loader & Mercea, 2011). Thus, we focus on identifying how public opinion is created in relation to the concept of income inequality in social networks as Twitter. From a methodological point of view, we propose an analysis of the tweets published by different users on Twitter around the concept of income inequality.