political polarization
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2022 ◽  
pp. 194016122110725
Author(s):  
Fanni Tóth ◽  
Sabina Mihelj ◽  
Václav Štětka ◽  
Katherine Kondor

In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
. Wahyutama

<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>


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
. Wahyutama

<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>


2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Riccardo Cantini ◽  
Fabrizio Marozzo ◽  
Domenico Talia ◽  
Paolo Trunfio

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.


2022 ◽  
pp. 279-306
Author(s):  
Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado ◽  
Eva Campos-Domínguez ◽  
Patrícia Dias dos Santos ◽  
Denise Hideko Goya ◽  
Mario Mangas Núñez ◽  
...  

This chapter addresses the creation of political conflict on Twitter in a comparative study between Brazil and Spain. Based on an analysis of the political debate on dealing with two countries' health crises, it analyses the most retweeted messages published during the first week of vaccination in Europe and the Americas. Firstly, it analysed the general characteristics of the online debate on the immunisation of COVID-19. Secondly, it carried out an analysis of information disorder in each country. Although governmental positions in both countries are opposed, the results allow establishing common patterns of polarized profiles in both countries that question the management of the pandemic. It can be seen how political polarization is shaped as a characteristic of disinformation in both countries. That reveals that, after the health crisis, there is a crisis of democratic institutions that impact public health actions, but specifically to combat COVID-19.


2022 ◽  
pp. 134-150
Author(s):  
Ikbal Maulana

Social media has eased the burden of people exercising their citizenship, such as engaging in public discourse or even mobilizing themselves for political causes. This technology was once expected to make society more democratic. However, its massive utilization in political contestation has led to the massive spread of disinformation, which further causes political polarization. The internet gives people the opportunity to cross-check information, and social media enables them to find clarification and reduce misunderstanding. However, the will to power is stronger than the will to truth, causing massive informational manipulation to attract followers and informational attack to denigrate opponents. Just as the running of democracy needs appropriate institutions, healthy citizenship also requires well-designed media that can improve deliberation and ease assessing and countering disinformation. A virtual version of citizen assembly is needed to lure people to more fruitful digital citizenship and distance them from unbridgeable polarization.


2022 ◽  
pp. 74-92
Author(s):  
Emiliana De Blasio ◽  
Rossella Rega ◽  
Michele Valente

Integration between digital platforms and news organizations has produced a substantial platformization of news. This phenomenon has been accompanied by a growing political polarization of journalistic content, exacerbated in Italy by the high level of partisanship that traditionally characterizes the national media. This chapter outlines one part of a wider study on the debate about the regularization of migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, based on mixed methods and a two-level analytical approach, considers articles and posts published on Facebook by 12 different news providers (top-down) along with users' comments on this content (bottom-up). The authors here present the investigation into the coverage of migrant worker regularization by discussing the findings of the evaluative assertion and news frame analyses carried out on the selected articles and posts. Using this multidimensional approach, the study highlights the persistent nature of polarization within a highly fragmented public sphere.


2022 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 104231
Author(s):  
Daniela Goya-Tocchetto ◽  
Aaron C. Kay ◽  
Heidi Vuletich ◽  
Andrew Vonasch ◽  
Keith Payne

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