Kyle Rose, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, was the lead author of “Political Influencers and Their Social Media Audiences during the 2021 Arizona Audit,” published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. This article was co-authored with Deana A. Rohlinger, Ph.D., professor of Sociology at FSU. The following summary was written by Jyana O’Donnell (B.A. English ‘26) and Rachel Lechwar (M.S. Communication Science and Disorders ’26).
Kyle Rose was the lead author of “Political Influencers and Their Social Media Audiences during the 2021 Arizona Audit.” This article examines Twitter discussions about the 2021 audit of Maricopa County’s general election results to contribute to a larger discussion about social media echo chambers, media consumption choices, and political polarization.

In examining the different voices involved in the Twitter discourse and their respective audiences, Rose found that conservative audiences sought out content from influencers and organizations with varying ideologies. Conservative influencers who shared conspiracy theories also had the smallest audience of all types of influencers. This leads Rose to argue that concerns about echo chambers, or insular online communities which share an ideology, are overstated.
“Our findings suggest that echo chambers are less important than users’ media seeking choices because most users pursue high quality information regardless of their political orientation, as indicated by the ideologically diverse audiences of mainstream media giants and local Arizona reporters,” Rose said. “Despite the concern for conservative social media users to follow their way into politically extreme echo chambers, the conspiracy-oriented group of conservative influencers had the smallest audience, and conservative users were observed among all influencer groups’ followers.”
Rose and Dr. Rohlinger analyzed 183 political influencer accounts and 3,000 audience accounts using data from July 17 and August 5, 2021, around the time of the Arizona audit of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This time period was chosen due to intense political discussion from both the left and right on the audit’s legitimacy. The 183 influencers represent the Twitter influencers which shared the most content about the election audit within the time frame.
After the influencers were chosen, the authors performed a network analysis to identify groups of influencers which shared audiences. The network analysis also allowed the authors to estimate the size of the audiences which engaged in online discourse about the Arizona election audit.
Once the shared audiences were clustered, the authors conducted an analysis of the influencers’ profile to determine if influencers with shared audiences also shared similar profiles. Factors such as self-identification with a political candidate, political party, or social justice group, or patriotism were included in the analysis. The followers of these influencers were analyzed using the same categories, with three additional ones: Arizona affiliation, affiliation with conspiracy theories, and non-English language accounts.
In examining the number and affiliation of influencers and followers in each of these categories, Rose and Dr. Rohlinger found that mainstream news organizations have the largest and most ideologically diverse audience, local Arizona reporters and politicians have a smaller but still ideologically diverse audience, and conspiracy oriented conservative influencers have the smallest and most ideologically homogenous audience. They also found that conservative audience members are present among all groups’ audiences, including liberal political influencers.

Figure 2. Summary of followers’ profile biographies by group.
These findings indicate that most users seek out varied and trustworthy information, and very few users are in extremist echo chambers. Rose calls for further study into individuals’ decision-making processes in their social media usage.
To learn more about Rose and Dr. Rohlinger’s work, click here, or to learn more about the Department of Sociology, click here.