Handful Of Twitter Users Can Sway Council Decisions, Finds Data Analysis Of ‘Low Traffic Neighborhood’ Posts

“If the Internet was a block of flats, would you want to move in?” asked London-based Jimmy Tidey on tech media site Hackermoon in 2017. An expert on Twitter tribes, Tidey argued that self-selection and algorithms separate people from information which disagrees with their viewpoints, leading to online polarisation.

His latest research delves into the divisive debates about London’s new “low traffic neighborhoods.” Using graphics to represent “filter bubbles,” he explores how a small number of individuals on Twitter can convince themselves and others—including councils—that their opinions are the truly mainstream ones.

“Factions often present themselves simultaneously as an oppressed minority and the silent majority,” says Tidey.

“The filter bubble phenomena makes users feel that every right-thinking person agrees with them, and factions can build self-reinforcing logic uninterrupted by interactions with people they disagree with.”

Across three Medium articles, Tidey explores how the creation of low-car-use zones in London—via the installation of planters and bollards, and sometimes number-plate recognition cameras—has led to an often vitriolic war of words on social media, especially Twitter.

Low traffic neighborhoods or LTNs aim to decrease through traffic—so-called “rat-running”—on residential streets, but they have become the “biggest transport controversy of the century,” claims former Labour parliamentary candidate and transport writer Christian Wolmar.

Active travel

LTNs are nothing new—roads were blocked to carriages in Ancient Pompeii, for instance—but they have come to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic after cash injections from central government encouraged local authorities to promote walking and cycling and discourage motoring.

The government funded widened sidewalks, pop-up cycleways, and the implementation of “emergency” LTNs with £250 million announced in May and a further £175 million more recently.

A YouGov survey commissioned by Greenpeace found strong public support for measures to increase “active travel,” including LTNs. Furthermore, the Department for Transport said a survey conducted by Kantar Media in October indicated that 65% of people across England supported reallocating road space to cycling and walking in their local areas.

Critics on social media claim these surveys are bogus and point instead to online petitions that show the opposite.

Those against LTNs argue that they increase traffic jams and air pollution, favor wealthy residents over poor ones, and block emergency vehicles.

“[LTNs] cut overall motor traffic and create large neighborhoods where air pollution, carbon emissions, noise, and congestion are dramatically lowered,” counters the London Cycling Campaign, adding that “streets become inviting spaces where neighbors can chat to each other and kids play out again.”

Heat and light

Using his proprietary LocalNets social media analytics tool—which he developed for this recently completed Ph.D.—Tidey collected data on LTN arguments via Twitter’s application programming interface or API. He found that 20 of the most engaged Twitter users were responsible for half of the total for and against activity about LTNs.

“A small number of people can make a lot of noise,” says Tidey.

“Some Twitter users engage in long threads with up to 40 users tagged in, allowing them to generate huge numbers of connections.”

While much of this effort results in “unproductive shouting matches,” warns Tidey, “it does show Twitter’s capacity to drive civic engagement.”

Councils—at the heart of such civic engagement by design—can be scared and scarred by shouty individuals. Many councils have buckled under pressure from anti-LTNers and removed what were claimed to be “controversial” schemes. Controversial because of online debate, which often spread out into the real world, with councilors and council officials targeted with hate campaigns, a “dark world of vandalism, doxxing and death threats on your doorstep,” wrote New Statesman journalist Anoosh Chakelian last month.

Some LTN critics bill themselves as “roads-for-all” and “clean-air” campaigners, arguing that motorists are treated unequally even though most roads—even within LTNs—remain almost wholly permeable to those in motor vehicles.

“Many anti-LTN campaigners couch their concerns in terms of their right to drive, or authoritarian threats to their freedom of movement,” says Tidey.

Other critics argue that LTNs are discriminatory towards disabled people, although most of these critics have never previously championed disability rights.

Critiques of LTNs can get heated on social media, but none more so, found Tidey, than the objections raised by some of London’s 20,000 black cab drivers—or cabbies—who account for around 8% of the 120 most active accounts.

“Black cab drivers are disproportionately represented [in the LTN debates],” says Tidey. Cabbies tend not to interact with pro-LTN accounts, choosing to oppose LTNs from deep within the anti-LTN community. Those most active in the debate also have a “strong tendency to follow pro-Brexit accounts,” reveals Tidey.

“I am not making a case that supporting or opposing Brexit is problematic or relevant to transport policy,” he points out, “except to the extent that it marks out distinctive subcommunities and suggests how views on LTNs connect with wider political views.”

Many of the most vociferous LTN critics—including cabbies—like to claim that motoring is the majority mode of transport in the London boroughs where LTNs have been installed. Tidey lives in Bethnal Green, close to the LTNs in Tower Hamlets, an east London borough where most residents do not drive. According to the 2011 census, 56% of residents did not have access to a car or van, which is now believed to be more than 60%.

“When dealing with citizens with trenchant or extreme views, it’s helpful to ask what fraction of the population they represent,” suggests Tidey.

“LTNs have been so controversial,” he says, because a “small number of people can make a lot of noise.

“[But] there is no democratic reason to privilege them in decision making,” adds Tidey.

Nevertheless, anti- and pro-LTN Twitter influencers “represent an important channel for communication” and it would be useful to engage with them creatively to deflect “futile hostility.”

For Tidey, it’s “hard to imagine politics without Twitter” and “whether we like it or not, a tool designed in San Fransisco in 2006 as an alternative to text messaging has become the predominant means of political discussion online.”

It makes sense, he adds, “for borough councils to keep their ear to the ground by checking what is being said on Twitter” but, he stresses, local governments should not be swayed by what may appear to be a groundswell of support for a particular point of view when it’s likely to be heat and light generated by only a small number of indidivuals.

While it might seem obvious that Twitter does not represent the community at large, “it’s easy to forget that,” shows Tidey with data.

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