A study of Twitter debates about Common Core educational standards has broad implications for American politics and methods of debate.

Researchers from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE)analyzed about one million tweets over a 32-month period and documented the tools and strategies used to leverage online relationships and spread messages.  They found that the increased use of Twitter in combination with the decreased influence of “professional” media has led to an increase in both broad reporting and in the spread of unsubstantiated, exaggerated or fake news stories. In addition, people have become more segregated by beliefs and their opinions have become more polarized. Jonathan Supovitz is a professor of education policy and leadership at GSE and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). Dr. Supovitz led the team that also included Alan J. Daly (University of California, San Diego), Christian Kolouch (GSE) and Miguel del Fresno (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid, Spain).

They uncovered patterns including:

The Common Core debate on Twitter reveals how social media is transforming political discourse in America.

The combination of social and technological advocacy strategies have ratcheted up the power of external political pressure groups.

The consumers of political content are becoming increasingly segmented, reducing vital opportunities for engagement with ideas.

Fake News is not news. It is a longstanding problem, and the education sector is not immune.

Differences in the ways we process information may lead to misunderstanding rather than genuine disagreement.

Twitter is a uniquely powerful tool for disseminating information, but its structure lends itself to manipulation.

Paradoxically, even as we have more information available to us, we are less informed.

Instead of a traditional academic study, the #commoncore project is an interactive website that allows users to experience how the Twitter conversation evolved.