Context matters: political polarization on Twitter from a comparative perspective

Abstract

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.

You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of fake news

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Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy on English-language Twitter

“…Echo chambers help rumours spread on Twitter because users are connected to a likeminded network that is not isolated from the rest of Twitter (Choi et al, 2020). The extent of political polarization on Twitter varies internationally, affecting the strength of echo chamber effects (Matuszewski;Szabó, 2019;Urman, 2020). Websites that are exclusively used by people from one political orientation (Freelon; Marwick; Kreiss, 2020; Lima et al, 2018) may reduce the polarisation of more general sites, like Twitter, that are used by people from many political opinions (not necessarily reading each other's posts).…”

Testing the effects of Facebook usage in an ethnically polarized setting

“…This question is being asked with increasing urgency in the context of established democracies, and in particular the United States, with an eye toward establishing whether there is a relationship between social media usage and increasing levels of political polarization (1-3) and, in particular, affective polarization, which is an indicator of partisan animus (4). Although most research on this topic has been conducted in the context of advanced democracies, there is an increasing acknowledgment of the need to understand the role social media plays within different political contexts (1,5), due to the fact that the use of social media and the internet continues to grow in emerging and developing countries (6). Moreover, we know little about the impact of social media usage on attitudes toward ethnic outgroups, as opposed to supporters of opposing political parties.…”