scholarly journals Political Polarization During 2017-2021

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akshay Padala ◽  
Lee Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Significant Rise ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Government Involvement ◽  
Political Opinions

During the Trump era there was a significant rise of hate crimes, racial bullying, and violence against the LGBTQ+ community which can be explained by political polarization. Both major political parties were pushed to the far ends of the spectrum to counteract the influence of the other side. We tested how this polarization occurs at the level of individual political issues, and study the political factors under Trump that contributed to it. We used a survey research method to collect data on peoples’ beliefs over 5 different contentious political topics (abortion, climate change, gun control, healthcare, and immigration). This data was compared to data from studies performed in 2016 (pre-Trump). To ensure standardization of the data, our survey used the same questions as the previous surveys. Along with the questions gauging opinion, we also included an individual question per issue that gauged how the participant formed that opinion. Compared to 2016 there was a shift towards more government involvement and regulation in the areas of healthcare and gun control, respectively. There was a shift towards environmental protection, and less stringent immigration standards. More participants were in favor of abortion. Most participants said they formed ALL of their political opinions individually. However, social media and major news outlets had played a role in shaping opinions about abortion and environment, respectively. Compared to 2016 surveys there was a significant change in public opinion about various issues of contemporary importance, partly influenced by political polarization and by social media and news outlets.

Political Interaction Beyond Party Lines: Communication Ties and Party Polarization in Parliamentary Twitter Networks

2021 ◽  
pp. 089443932098756
Author(s):  
Marc Esteve Del Valle ◽  
Marcel Broersma ◽  
Arnout Ponsioen
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Exponential Random Graph Models ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
Exponential Random Graph ◽  
Political Networks ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
High Degree

A growing body of research has examined the uptake of social media by politicians, the formation of communication ties in online political networks, and the interplay between social media and political polarization. However, few studies have analyzed how social media are affecting communication in parliamentary networks. This is especially relevant in highly fragmented political systems in which collaboration between political parties is crucial to win support in parliament. Does MPs’ use of social media foster communications among parliamentarians who think differently, or does it result in like-minded clusters polarized along party lines, confining MPs to those who think alike? This study analyzes the formation of communication ties and the degree of homophily in the Dutch MPs’ @mention Twitter network. We employed exponential random graph models on a 1-year sample of all tweets in which Dutch MPs mentioned each other ( N = 7,356) to discover the network parameters (reciprocity, popularity, and brokerage) and individual attributes (seniority, participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area) that facilitate communication ties among parliamentarians. Also, we measured party polarization by calculating the external–internal index of the mentions. Dutch MPs’ communication ties arise from network dynamics (reciprocity, brokerage, and popularity) and from MPs’ participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area. Furthermore, there is a high degree of cross-party interactions in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network. Our results refute the existence of “echo chambers” in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network and support the hypothesis that social media can open up spaces for discussion among political parties. This is particularly important in fragmented consensus democracies where negotiation and coordination between parties to form coalitions is key.

scholarly journals Social Media and Youth Political Participation at the Time of Political Polarization: A Study on University Students in Indonesia during the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
. Wahyutama
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Social Isolation ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Spiral Of Silence ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Conversation

<p>Some studies theorized social media as fostering youth political participation by facilitating the development of online participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2009). Online participatory cultures provide young citizens with opportunities to discuss and gain information about political topics, create capacity for action by promoting digital skills and norms for group interaction, and facilitate recruitment into civic and political life (Kahne et al., 2013). Against the backdrop of this discourse, this research aims to investigate social media and youth political participation in Indonesia’s context.  This project’s research questions ask: How politics is experienced by Indonesian youth and how social media is used by them to engage with political activities? To answer those questions, this research conducted a survey (n=265) and interviews (n=29) with students from three universities in Jakarta. This research adopted grounded theory approach in analysing the data.  This research revealed that social media in general provides affordances for youth to engage with activities related to political conversation and social-political campaign (as indicated by the findings that social media attracts more numbers of youth participating in these two categories of activity). Thus, this research in part support propositions advocated by the thesis of online participatory cultures that social media facilitates youth political participation.  However, under the specific context of ethnic and religious-based political polarization which happened during this research, this research also revealed that the salient form of social media use by youth is in fact monitoring political conversation. This activity is driven by the sense of “kepo” (the drive to asses how others are thinking, feeling, and responding to certain political issues) and has the effect on youth’s fear of social isolation (in the form of fear of breaking relationship with others). Eventually, this activity leads youth to the act of silence (in the form of refraining political expression on social media). In this case, this research (unintentionally) confirm the theory of spiral of silence proposed by Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (1984).  Finally, this research contributes to the academic discourse by providing a critical insight into the way social media could lead its users to the process of spiral of silence i.e. by exacerbating the fear of social isolation obtained from the activity of social surveillance (in the form of monitoring political conversation).</p>

scholarly journals Social Media and Youth Political Participation at the Time of Political Polarization: A Study on University Students in Indonesia during the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
. Wahyutama
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Social Isolation ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Spiral Of Silence ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Conversation

<p>Some studies theorized social media as fostering youth political participation by facilitating the development of online participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2009). Online participatory cultures provide young citizens with opportunities to discuss and gain information about political topics, create capacity for action by promoting digital skills and norms for group interaction, and facilitate recruitment into civic and political life (Kahne et al., 2013). Against the backdrop of this discourse, this research aims to investigate social media and youth political participation in Indonesia’s context.  This project’s research questions ask: How politics is experienced by Indonesian youth and how social media is used by them to engage with political activities? To answer those questions, this research conducted a survey (n=265) and interviews (n=29) with students from three universities in Jakarta. This research adopted grounded theory approach in analysing the data.  This research revealed that social media in general provides affordances for youth to engage with activities related to political conversation and social-political campaign (as indicated by the findings that social media attracts more numbers of youth participating in these two categories of activity). Thus, this research in part support propositions advocated by the thesis of online participatory cultures that social media facilitates youth political participation.  However, under the specific context of ethnic and religious-based political polarization which happened during this research, this research also revealed that the salient form of social media use by youth is in fact monitoring political conversation. This activity is driven by the sense of “kepo” (the drive to asses how others are thinking, feeling, and responding to certain political issues) and has the effect on youth’s fear of social isolation (in the form of fear of breaking relationship with others). Eventually, this activity leads youth to the act of silence (in the form of refraining political expression on social media). In this case, this research (unintentionally) confirm the theory of spiral of silence proposed by Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (1984).  Finally, this research contributes to the academic discourse by providing a critical insight into the way social media could lead its users to the process of spiral of silence i.e. by exacerbating the fear of social isolation obtained from the activity of social surveillance (in the form of monitoring political conversation).</p>

scholarly journals Analyzing Political Polarization on Social Media by Deleting Bot Spamming

2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Riccardo Cantini ◽  
Fabrizio Marozzo ◽  
Domenico Talia ◽  
Paolo Trunfio
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Rich Data

Social media platforms are part of everyday life, allowing the interconnection of people around the world in large discussion groups relating to every topic, including important social or political issues. Therefore, social media have become a valuable source of information-rich data, commonly referred to as Social Big Data, effectively exploitable to study the behavior of people, their opinions, moods, interests and activities. However, these powerful communication platforms can be also used to manipulate conversation, polluting online content and altering the popularity of users, through spamming activities and misinformation spreading. Recent studies have shown the use on social media of automatic entities, defined as social bots, that appear as legitimate users by imitating human behavior aimed at influencing discussions of any kind, including political issues. In this paper we present a new methodology, namely TIMBRE (Time-aware opInion Mining via Bot REmoval), aimed at discovering the polarity of social media users during election campaigns characterized by the rivalry of political factions. This methodology is temporally aware and relies on a keyword-based classification of posts and users. Moreover, it recognizes and filters out data produced by social media bots, which aim to alter public opinion about political candidates, thus avoiding heavily biased information. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study that analyzes the polarization of a large number of Twitter users during the 2016 US presidential election. The achieved results show the benefits brought by both removing bots and taking into account temporal aspects in the forecasting process, revealing the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, we investigated how the presence of social bots may affect political discussion by studying the 2016 US presidential election. Specifically, we analyzed the main differences between human and artificial political support, estimating also the influence of social bots on legitimate users.

What’s political Twitter talking about?

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-190
Author(s):  
Kylah J. Hedding ◽  
Kevin Ripka
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Presidential Debates ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Policy Agendas

Abstract This study explicates the concept of news media agendamelding. While only one-quarter of U.S. adults are on Twitter, it remains a popular platform among news media and political elites who often still set the public agenda for political discourse. Twitter provides insights into the issues that are at the top of the media and policy agendas, as well as how social media might influence the way journalists approach political issues. At the same time, there is concern about the influence of social media on political polarization. This study uses a specific set of influential Twitter users to examine one main question: Were there differences between right, left, and center political media reactions during the 2016 presidential debates? This study provides further evidence that there is, in fact, a conservative political Twitter media agenda that exists separately from liberal or nonpartisan media outlets.

scholarly journals Political Communication With Social Media In Pakistan: Internal And External Efficacy

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (II) ◽  
pp. 130-138
Author(s):  
Hannan Khan Tareen ◽  
Malik Adnan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Political knowledge influences political behavior and political participation as the person who has sufficient political knowledge will contribute his part in political issues and get engage himself in political campaigns. Hence, a politically informed person put an impact upon others by sharing his views and information. Now a day social media has revolutionized the world due to its unlimited features, and it made it easier for everyone to spread the news and especially the political content. Different political parties use social media platforms to engage their voters and especially youth. This study suggests that social media plays a critical role for youngsters to disseminate information regarding politics and affects the internal and external efficacy of youth by the transmission of knowledge and political participation through social media.

Context matters: political polarization on Twitter from a comparative perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 857-879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Urman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
The Subject

This article explores the issue of political polarization on social media. It shows that the intensity of polarization on Twitter varies greatly from one country to another. The analysis is performed using network-analytic audience duplication approach and is based on the data about the followers of the political parties’ Twitter accounts in 16 democratic countries. Based on the topology of the audience duplication graphs, the political Twitterspheres of the countries are classified as perfectly integrated, integrated, mixed, polarized and perfectly polarized. Explorative analysis shows that polarization is the highest in two-party systems with plurality electoral rules and the lowest in multi-party systems with proportional voting. The findings help explain the discrepancies in the results of previous studies into polarization on social media. The results of the study indicate that extrapolation of the findings from single-case studies on the topic is impossible in most cases, suggesting that more comparative studies on the matter are necessary to better understand the subject and get generalizable results.

scholarly journals Moral conviction increases sharing preference for politically congruent headlines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Marie ◽  
Sacha Altay ◽  
Brent Strickland
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Moral Conviction ◽  
Political News ◽  
Sex Equality ◽  
Moral Importance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Information Streams

Evidence suggests that political polarization in the United States may be due, in part, to liberal and conservative partisans living in different factual realities, as a consequence of being exposed to information streams that rarely challenge their background beliefs and cherished narratives. In this project, we approached the issue of biased access to political information at the level of information emission, by focusing on ordinary citizens’ decisions to share political news headlines on simulated social media touching on four controversial issues: gun control, abortion, sex equality and racial equality. Across 8 studies, we found robust evidence that participants have a sharing preference for politically congruent news items over incongruent ones, and that this sharing bias increases with the moral importance of the issue. Those effects were observed on true and false headlines alike. Perceived accuracy and coalitional motivations to share headlines to advance political goals were among the main motivations to share. The transmission preference for congruent content and its interaction with issue importance held in spite of manipulations of the anonymousness of sharing (from an anonymous vs. a personal social media account), and audience’s political congeniality (agree vs. disagree). Intervention messages reminding participants of their susceptibility to the myside bias had little moderating influence. While biased communication on politics may be rational for the individual, it likely contributes to reinforce partisan differences in perceptions of society, and may reinforce affective polarization.

scholarly journals Political Polarization and Selective Exposure of Social Media Users in Indonesia

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 268
Author(s):  
Denny Januar Ali ◽  
Eriyanto Eriyanto
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Message Content ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Research Outcome ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Filter Bubble

This study is intended to answer the question of how political polarization is related to social media users’ posts about Covid-19. The researchers chose health cases related to Covid-19 instead of political issues (e.g. elections) to prove that this political polarization has spread to many areas. The research also wants to see the relationship between this political polarization and selective exposure. Theories applied in this study are polarization, filter bubble, and selective exposure. The study applied two methods: social media network analysis and content analysis. The network analysis included 82,156 posts, while the content analysis was carried out on 4,050 social media accounts. The research outcome proves the occurrence of political polarization. Social media users were divided into two major groups, namely pro-Jokowi and anti-Jokowi. Each group interacted with fellow users who had the same political choices and shared the same message content. Users with certain political choices tend to receive the same information as their political choices, and ignore information from other political parties. Another interesting finding from this study is how this polarization was sharpened by the use of hashtags. Each party (supporters and oppositions of Jokowi) uses hashtags to create solidarity and mobilization from each supporter. Research also proves the validity of the selective exposure and filter bubble hypothesis in the Indonesian context.

scholarly journals Social Media and the Electoral Politics of India

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 963-967
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Use Of Social Media

the use of social media has become a new strategy for the political parties during election campaign. The social media is playing a significant role in changing people’s perception towards politics, politicians and modes of political participation. The advent of budget smart phones and affordable data packages has given greater scope for people to voice their opinion on social and political issues. With accounts in every social media platforms, the political parties and their leaders are using it as a new space to mobilize people. Since 2014 Lok Sabha election, the social media is playing a pro-active role in deciding which party will win the election. While this has led to increased speed of spread of information and news, it has also left the ordinary people vulnerable to fake news and exposed them to ‘hate speech’. One hand, the social media is making Indian democracy more inclusive thereby giving citizens the space to express their opinion. On the other hand, it is also creating a gap between different communities by spreading fake news and propaganda. Hence, there should be some kind of restrictions to using it. The misuse can lead to chaos and instability in a democracy.

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