Taegyoon Kim just had an article, “Violent Political Rhetoric on Twitter,” accepted at Political Science Research and Methods. This paper also won the Sprague award for best graduate student paper in Political Networks in 2021. The citation for the paper by the award committee read: “Kim introduces a novel automated method for detecting violent political rhetoric on Twitter. Kim applies the method to a dataset around the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and the Capitol Riot, offering new substantive insights about the role social networks can play in spreading political violence rhetoric. The case study nicely validates the method, showing that violent tweets spike just before the Capitol Riot. Kim’s paper speaks directly to the important debate among scholars about the extent to which violent rhetoric tends to remain concentrated among a few extremists or leads to others being inadvertently exposed to the violent rhetoric. Kim’s findings suggest that violent tweets, while rare, spread widely through communication networks, reaching those without direct ties to the violent users on the fringe of social networks. The paper offers many additional substantive contributions, in addition to the methodological contribution, which we anticipate will be widely used by social scientists in a range of disciplines. Moreover, the paper is written in a way that is accessible to non-specialists, which we believe amplifies the scope of the contribution.”
