Political polarization is rampant on mainstream social media. The platform X, still called Twitter despite the Elon Musk rebranding, is also considered a hotbed for divisive political discourse and posturing. Researchers from Germany, led by Armin Pournaki of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, examined millions of tweets in the German Twitterverse to reveal how specific structural forces, amplification behaviors, and user roles strengthen ideological divisions across many issues.
German Researchers Found the Roles of Influencers and Multipliers in Driving Political Polarization on the X Platform
While influencers generate the content that sparks reactions, multipliers tirelessly retweet aligned messages across topics, creating dense echo chambers that harden political boundaries with remarkable consistency.
Examining X Users in Germany
The researchers wanted to understand how political polarization forms and stays strong on platforms like. Most previous research undertakings focused only on the role of online influencers or big accounts with huge followings and whose posts tend to have farther mileage and higher engagement. But the team suspected that another group was just as important.
Pournaki et al. focused on so-called multipliers. These are extremely active users who do not create much content but constantly repost content from other users. They wanted to know if these multipliers help strengthen political divides and reinforce certain political issues. The team also wanted to know if polarization is built into the structure of the platform.
The researchers gathered over 19 million tweets from Germany from 2021 to 2023. They focused on posts related to daily trending topics. The posts were grouped using machine learning to allow the team to compare user behavior across many issues. These include immigration, climate change, coronavirus, energy security, the Russia-Ukraine War, and elections.
Specifically, the team looked at who retweets whom, how often, and across how many topics, then measured whether individuals fall either under the influencer or multiplier category of X users. A network map was created for each trending topic. This meant treating each user as a node and each retweet as a connection between users. This showed who amplified whom.
Role of Influencers and Multipliers
Findings revealed how structural patterns within the X environment of Germany create strong and persistent ideological divisions across many political topics. Mechanisms through which user behavior, amplification patterns, and network dynamics work together to reinforce polarization in consistent and measurable ways were identified. The following are the details:
• Structural Polarization
The platform consistently splits into two large ideological camps across numerous political topics. Users within each camp rarely interacted with the other side. Polarization was stable across issues rather than triggered only by specific controversies.
• Issue Alignment
Users tended to occupy the same ideological position across many discussions. Debates about climate, migration, health, and foreign policy followed the same left-right divide. Separate issues became linked within larger ideological battles.
• Power of Multipliers
The identified multipliers displayed strong issue alignment. Their constant amplification of ideologically consistent messages helped bind issues together and further strengthened the internal cohesion of their respective ideological camps.
• Asymmetry Between Roles
Influencers were more active in the left-liberal camp. Multipliers were more active in the right-conservative camp. This imbalance shaped how narratives circulated. Influencers provide visibility, and multipliers provide sustained amplification.
• Variations Across Topics
Non-political trends like entertainment and gaming had weaker polarization. Geopolitical topics revealed nuanced patterns. Debates on the Ukraine war showed occasional breaks among influencers. Multipliers remained consistently aligned.
Key Takeaways and Implications
The German Twitterverse splits into two stable clusters across many political issues. These are the left-liberal and the right-conservative clusters. This structural split appears consistently across topics rather than being confined to a few hot-button issues. Users also tend to have cross-issue alignment or keep the same ideological position across diverse issues.
Moreover, among the 1000 most retweeted influencers, most belong to the left-liberal cluster. By contrast, among the 1,00 most active multipliers, most were right-conservatives. This asymmetry shapes which narratives get amplified and by whom. Multipliers show higher alignment scores than influencers and are active across a larger number of trends.
The findings indicate that polarization is not only about creators of content but crucially about curators of content. Multipliers strengthen algorithmic visibility through the repeated resharing of ideologically-consistent material to produce structural alignment across otherwise separate issue domains. The role of multipliers could be generalized to other platforms.
However, despite the results, the study does not fully explain the narrative content or discursive mechanisms that cause issue alignment. This would necessitate qualitative analysis. The work also focused on Germany and German discourse on X. Similar studies should be done in other contexts and on other platforms to see how widespread the observed dynamics are.
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
- Pournaki, A., Gaisbauer, F., and Olbrich, E. 2025. “How Influencers and Multipliers Drive Polarization and Issue Alignment on Twitter/X.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 19: 1599-1615. DOI: 1609/icwsm.v19i1.35890