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Journal articles on the topic 'News Polarization'
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1
Abril, Eulàlia P. "Subduing attitude polarization?" Politics and the Life Sciences 37, no. 1 (2018): 68–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pls.2017.11.
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Researchers have sought to understand the effects of like-minded versus contrary news exposure on attitude polarization, which can be a threat to democracy. The online news environment offers opportunities for exposure tobothtypes of news, albeit unequally. This study tests the effects of exposure to heterogeneous partisan news bundles (both like-minded and contrary news) on attitude polarization. Because media exposure can lead to bias, attitude polarization is tested as a directandindirect effect via hostile media perceptions. Data in this study are from a between-subjects experimental design about the issue of assisted suicide. Results indicate that even though the effect of the partisan news bundle on hostile media perceptions is significant, both direct and indirect effects on attitude polarization are null.
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Garimella, Kiran, Tim Smith, Rebecca Weiss, and Robert West. "Political Polarization in Online News Consumption." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 15 (May 22, 2021): 152–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18049.
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Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the Web as a driver of polarization. In order to further our understanding of the factors behind online polarization, in the present work we collect and analyze Web browsing histories of tens of thousands of users alongside careful measurements of the time spent browsing various news sources. We show that online news consumption follows a polarized pattern, where users' visits to news sources aligned with their own political leaning are substantially longer than their visits to other news sources. Next, we show that such preferences hold at the individual as well as the population level, as evidenced by the emergence of clear partisan communities of news domains from aggregated browsing patterns. Finally, we tackle the important question of the role of user choices in polarization. Are users simply following the links proffered by their Web environment, or do they exacerbate partisan polarization by intentionally pursuing like-minded news sources? To answer this question, we compare browsing patterns with the underlying hyperlink structure spanned by the considered news domains, finding strong evidence of polarization in partisan browsing habits beyond that which can be explained by the hyperlink structure of the Web.
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Vicario, Michela Del, Walter Quattrociocchi, Antonio Scala, and Fabiana Zollo. "Polarization and Fake News." ACM Transactions on the Web 13, no. 2 (April 12, 2019): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3316809.
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Spohr, Dominic. "Fake news and ideological polarization." Business Information Review 34, no. 3 (August 23, 2017): 150–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266382117722446.
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This article addresses questions of ideological polarization and the filter bubble in social media. It develops a theoretical analysis of ideological polarization on social media by considering a range of relevant factors. Over recent years, fake news and the effect of the social media filter bubble have become of increasing importance both in academic and general discourse. The article reviews the assumption that algorithmic curation and personalization systems place users in a filter bubble of content that decreases their likelihood of encountering ideologically cross-cutting news content. At the intersection of new media, politics and behavioural science, the article establishes a theoretical framework for further research and future actions by society, policymakers and industries.
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Martin, Gregory J., and Ali Yurukoglu. "Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization." American Economic Review 107, no. 9 (September 1, 2017): 2565–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160812.
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We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, nor with local satellite viewership. We estimate that Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position. We then estimate a model of voters who select into watching slanted news, and whose ideologies evolve as a result. We use the model to assess the growth over time of Fox News influence, to quantitatively assess media-driven polarization, and to simulate alternative ideological slanting of news channels. (JEL D72, L82)
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Hart, P. Sol, Sedona Chinn, and Stuart Soroka. "Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage." Science Communication 42, no. 5 (August 25, 2020): 679–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1075547020950735.
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This study examines the level of politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news in U.S. newspapers and televised network news from March to May 2020. Using multiple computer-assisted content analytic approaches, we find that newspaper coverage is highly politicized, network news coverage somewhat less so, and both newspaper and network news coverage are highly polarized. We find that politicians appear in newspaper coverage more frequently than scientists, whereas politicians and scientists are more equally featured in network news. We suggest that the high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.
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Fletcher, Richard, Alessio Cornia, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. "How Polarized Are Online and Offline News Audiences? A Comparative Analysis of Twelve Countries." International Journal of Press/Politics 25, no. 2 (December 15, 2019): 169–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1940161219892768.
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Polarization is a key area of interest for media and communication scholars. We develop a way of measuring how polarized news audience behaviour is at the national level. Then, we analyze survey data from twelve countries and find (1) that cross-platform (online and offline) news audience polarization is highest in the United States, and within Europe, higher in polarized pluralist/southern countries than in democratic corporatist countries. Furthermore, (2) in most countries, online news audience polarization is higher than offline, but in a small number it’s lower. Taken together, our findings highlight that, despite the well-documented fears associated with algorithmic selection, news audience polarization is not inevitable in environments that are increasingly characterized by digital news consumption, and that the historical, economic, and political factors emphasized by the comparative tradition remain critically important for our understanding of global trends.
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McLaughlin, Bryan. "Commitment to the Team." Journal of Media Psychology 30, no. 1 (January 2018): 41–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000176.
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Abstract. Scholars have increasingly employed social identity theory to explain how and why political polarization occurs. This study aims to build off of this work by proposing that perception of intergroup conflict serves as a mechanism that mediates the effect of news media coverage on political polarization. Specifically, I argue that the news media’s emphasis on political animosity can cultivate partisans’ perception that the parties are in conflict, which provides a context that makes partisan identity salient and, ultimately, leads to higher levels of affective and ideological polarization. This hypothesis is tested with an experiment using an American national sample of Democrats and Republicans (N = 300). Participants read a news story in which the public believes the parties are in a state of either high or low conflict (or they did not receive a news story). Using mediation analysis, the results of the study provide evidence that news media coverage of political conflict leads to increased perception of intergroup conflict, which then leads to higher levels of (a) partisan identification, (b) affective polarization, and (c) ideological polarization.
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Han, Jiyoung, and Marco Yzer. "Media-Induced Misperception Further Divides Public Opinion." Journal of Media Psychology 32, no. 2 (April 2020): 70–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000259.
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Abstract. Although there is growing evidence that partisans believe they are further apart than they actually are, the causes and consequences of this misperception are not always clear. Informed by the literature on news framing and self-categorization theory, we hypothesize that the media’s focus on partisan conflict increases partisans’ perceptions of public polarization, which fuels partisan attitude polarization on disputed issues in news coverage. Study 1 supports this contention in the political domain. By retesting the hypotheses in a gender context, Study 2 further demonstrates that the impact of conflict news framing on attitude polarization is not simply due to preexisting political polarization. The implications of the present study are discussed in light of its generalizability to varying political systems.
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Coscia, Michele, and Luca Rossi. "How minimizing conflicts could lead to polarization on social media: An agent-based model investigation." PLOS ONE 17, no. 1 (January 27, 2022): e0263184. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263184.
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Social media represent an important source of news for many users. They are, however, affected by misinformation and they might be playing a role in the growth of political polarization. In this paper, we create an agent based model to investigate how policing content and backlash on social media (i.e. conflict) can lead to an increase in polarization for both users and news sources. Our model is an advancement over previously proposed models because it allows us to study the polarization of both users and news sources, the evolution of the audience connections between users and sources, and it makes more realistic assumptions about the starting conditions of the system. We find that the tendency of users and sources to avoid policing, backlash and conflict in general can increase polarization online. Specifically polarization comes from the ease of sharing political posts, intolerance for opposing points of view causing backlash and policing, and volatility in changing one’s opinion when faced with new information. On the other hand, it seems that the integrity of a news source in trying to resist the backlash and policing has little effect.
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Borella, Carlo Alessandro, and Diego Rossinelli. "Fake News, Immigration, and Opinion Polarization." SocioEconomic Challenges 1, no. 4 (2017): 59–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.21272/sec.1(4).59-72.2017.
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Levy, Ro’ee. "Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment." American Economic Review 111, no. 3 (March 1, 2021): 831–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.20191777.
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Does the consumption of ideologically congruent news on social media exacerbate polarization? I estimate the effects of social media news exposure by conducting a large field experiment randomly offering participants subscriptions to conservative or liberal news outlets on Facebook. I collect data on the causal chain of media effects: subscriptions to outlets, exposure to news on Facebook, visits to online news sites, and sharing of posts, as well as changes in political opinions and attitudes. Four main findings emerge. First, random variation in exposure to news on social media substantially affects the slant of news sites that individuals visit. Second, exposure to counter-attitudinal news decreases negative attitudes toward the opposing political party. Third, in contrast to the effect on attitudes, I find no evidence that the political leanings of news outlets affect political opinions. Fourth, Facebook’s algorithm is less likely to supply individuals with posts from counter-attitudinal outlets, conditional on individuals subscribing to them. Together, the results suggest that social media algorithms may limit exposure to counter-attitudinal news and thus increase polarization. (JEL C93, D72, L82)
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Liu, Frank C. S. "Polarized News Media and the Polarization of the Electorate." International Journal of Artificial Life Research 1, no. 1 (January 2010): 35–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/jalr.2010102103.
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An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that in democracies that usually divide into two camps during a campaign season, the news media environment is fragmented and polarized. An emerging concern is whether the electorate in such divided societies would be pulled by polarized news media outlets and become polarized as well. This study, employing a series of agent-based simulations that takes into account polarized news media, communication networks, and individual differences all together, explores the effect of a polarized news environment on increases in extremist opinions and in the proportion of individuals with divided communication networks. It also identifies circumstances under which individuals perceive division within their communication networks. The findings suggest that the effect of a polarized news media environment on polarizing the electorate may be overestimated, while the homogenizing effect of communication networks may be underestimated.
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MARTIN, GREGORY J., and JOSHUA McCRAIN. "Local News and National Politics." American Political Science Review 113, no. 2 (February 19, 2019): 372–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003055418000965.
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The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.
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Doğu, Burak. "Turkey’s news media landscape in Twitter: Mapping interconnections among diversity." Journalism 21, no. 5 (June 27, 2017): 688–706. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464884917713791.
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Twitter plays a substantial role in shaping the online news media landscape, which is established on the interconnections between various actors. This research conducts network analysis in Twitter with the aim to explore Turkey’s polarized news media landscape in the aftermath of the Gezi protests. The findings, based on a relational approach, are analyzed at four levels: identifying the actors, positioning the actors and examining connections among their clusters, exploring the patterns of news diffusion, and reviewing media polarization. It has been found that distinct conditions such as intermedia differences apply to each one of those levels, while polarization is evident in the network.
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Waldrop, M. Mitchell. "News Feature: Modeling the power of polarization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 37 (September 8, 2021): e2114484118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2114484118.
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Kim, Yonghwan. "How Cross-Cutting News Exposure Relates to Candidate Issue Stance Knowledge, Political Polarization, and Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Sophistication." International Journal of Public Opinion Research 31, no. 4 (2019): 626–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edy032.
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AbstractThis article seeks to improve our understanding of the role of cross-cutting news exposure in a democratic process—that is, whether and how exposure to counter-attitudinal news information is associated with citizens’ political issue knowledge, attitudinal polarization, and engagement in political activities. The results provide 2 contrasting roles of exposure to dissonant media outlets. On the one hand, results offer some evidence that dissonant media use contributes to gaining issue knowledge and inspiring citizen participation. On the other hand, some findings suggest that it reinforces, rather than attenuates, citizens’ attitudinal polarization. Thus, the findings from this study indicate mixed effects of exposure to counter-attitudinal news information.
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Suiter, Jane, and Richard Fletcher. "Polarization and partisanship: Key drivers of distrust in media old and new?" European Journal of Communication 35, no. 5 (March 13, 2020): 484–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323120903685.
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Some worry that increased partisanship is lowering trust in the news media, as people increasingly come into contact with cross-cutting news coverage. We use multilevel analysis of online survey data from 35 countries and find that left-right partisans (1) have slightly less trust in the news media in general, (2) slightly higher levels of trust in the news they consume and (3) perceive a larger ‘trust gap’ between the news they use and the rest of the news available within their country. However, we do not find evidence to support the idea that people in more politically polarized countries have less trust in the news, or that the association between partisanship and trust is strengthened in polarized political environments. Although in most cases the relationship between partisanship and trust is weak, it is noticeably stronger in the United States. However, the United States is home to a unique media system, and our analysis highlights the problems of assuming that the processes at work in one relatively well-understood country are playing out in the same way globally.
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Ostafiński, Witold. "American Media Coverage of the January 6, 2021 Events at the United States Capitol: A Glimpse into the Polarisation of the United States News Media." Zeszyty Prasoznawcze 65, no. 4 (252) (December 16, 2022): 25–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/22996362pz.22.037.16495.
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Amerykańskie relacje medialne z wydarzeń na Kapitolu z 6 stycznia 2021 roku. Polaryzacja mediów informacyjnych w Stanach Zjednoczonych Celem artykułu jest ukazanie skrajnej polaryzacji politycznej mediów informacyjnych w Stanach Zjednoczonych przez pryzmat doniesień dotyczących szturmu na Kapitolu 6 stycznia 2021 roku. Analiza tekstów prasowych, liberalnych i konserwatywnych źródeł informacyjnych donoszących o tym ataku pozwoliła pokazać, że szturm na Kapitol był zarówno produktem samej polaryzacji mediów, jak i wydarzeniem, które przyspieszyło dalszą polaryzację mediów. Uzyskane wyniki badań ujawniają, że istnieje poważna rozbieżność w zakresie relacjonowania tego samego wydarzenia przez różne media, bazujące na odmiennych źródłach informacji. Artykuł pokazuje, że wydarzenia z 6 stycznia 2021 roku dostarczają środków poznawczych, za pomocą których można zrozumieć trwającą od dawna polaryzację ideologiczną amerykańskich źródeł medialnych. This paper aims to examine the extreme political polarization of the United States news media through the lens of the reporting on the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Through a close reading of news articles reporting on this event from both liberal and conservative news sources, this paper argues that the insurrection was both the product of this media polarization, as well as an event which precipitated further polarization of these media sources. The results of this research demonstrate that there is indeed a major discrepancy in media coverage of this event between the two disparate sources of news. Overall, this paper demonstrates that the January 6, 2021 events provide a cognitive means by which one can best ascertain the long-standing ideological polarization of the American news media sources.
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Turetsky, Kate M., and Travis A. Riddle. "Porous Chambers, Echoes of Valence and Stereotypes." Social Psychological and Personality Science 9, no. 2 (September 28, 2017): 163–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550617733519.
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Selective exposure to one-sided news coverage, especially of controversial geopolitical events, may contribute to growing social polarization. Existing research on “echo chambers”—fragmented information environments that amplify homogeneous perspectives—focuses on the degree to which individuals and social media platforms shape informational segregation. Here, we explore whether news organizations directly contribute to echo chambers through the hyperlinks they embed in online articles. Using network and text analysis, we examined coverage of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and found that online news media exhibited weak community structure and high connectivity across news outlets. However, analyses also indicated that media sources were more likely to link to coverage that was similar to their own in terms of emotional valence and stereotype-relevant aspects of the events. While hyperlinking to diverse news sources may ameliorate fragmented information environments, selectively linking to similar coverage may contribute to growing polarization.
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Bozdağ, Çiğdem, and Suncem Koçer. "Skeptical Inertia in the Face of Polarization: News Consumption and Misinformation in Turkey." Media and Communication 10, no. 2 (May 26, 2022): 169–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i2.5057.
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Focusing on Turkey, this article analyzes the role of polarization on news users’ perception of misinformation and mistrust in the news on social media. Turkey is one of the countries where citizens complain most about misinformation on the internet. The citizens’ trust in news institutions is also in continuous decline. Furthermore, both Turkish society and its media landscape are politically highly polarized. Focusing on Turkey’s highly polarized environment, the article aims to analyze how political polarization influences the users’ trust in the news and their perceptions about misinformation on social media. The study is based on multi-method research, including focus groups, media diaries, and interviews with people of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. The article firstly demonstrates different strategies that the users develop to validate information, including searching for any suspicious information on search engines, looking at the comments below the post, and looking at other news media, especially television. Secondly, we will discuss how more affective mechanisms of news assessment come into prominence while evaluating political news. Although our participants are self-aware and critical about their partisan attitudes in news consumption and evaluation, they also reveal media sources to which they feel politically closer. We propose the concept of “skeptical inertia” to refer to this self-critical yet passive position of the users in the face of the polarized news environment in Turkey.
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Balasubramanyan, Ramnath, William Cohen, Douglas Pierce, and David Redlawsk. "Modeling Polarizing Topics: When Do Different Political Communities Respond Differently to the Same News?" Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 6, no. 1 (August 3, 2021): 18–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v6i1.14237.
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Political discourse in the United States is getting increasingly polarized. This polarization frequently causes different communities to react very differently to the same news events. Political blogs as a form of social media provide an unique insight into this phenomenon. We present a multitarget, semisupervised latent variable model, MCR-LDA to model this process by analyzing political blogs posts and their comment sections from different political communities jointly to predict the degree of polarization that news topics cause. Inspecting the model after inference reveals topics and the degree to which it triggers polarization. In this approach, community responses to news topics are observed using sentiment polarity and comment volume which serves as a proxy for the level of interest in the topic. In this context, we also present computational methods to assign sentiment polarity to the comments which serve as targets for latent variable models that predict the polarity based on the topics in the blog content. Our results show that the joint modeling of communities with different political beliefs using MCR-LDA does not sacrifice accuracy in sentiment polarity prediction when compared to approaches that are tailored to specific communities and additionally provides a view of the polarization in responses from the different communities.
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Guilbeault, Douglas, Samuel Woolley, and Joshua Becker. "Probabilistic social learning improves the public’s judgments of news veracity." PLOS ONE 16, no. 3 (March 9, 2021): e0247487. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247487.
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The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs that require social media users to classify news in binary terms as either true or false. However, research on peer influence suggests that framing decisions in binary terms can amplify judgment errors and limit social learning, whereas framing decisions in probabilistic terms can reliably improve judgments. In this preregistered experiment, we compare online peer networks that collaboratively evaluated the veracity of news by communicating either binary or probabilistic judgments. Exchanging probabilistic estimates of news veracity substantially improved individual and group judgments, with the effect of eliminating polarization in news evaluation. By contrast, exchanging binary classifications reduced social learning and maintained polarization. The benefits of probabilistic social learning are robust to participants’ education, gender, race, income, religion, and partisanship.
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Le, Huyen, Zubair Shafiq, and Padmini Srinivasan. "Scalable News Slant Measurement Using Twitter." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 11, no. 1 (May 3, 2017): 584–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14957.
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Prior research has reported evidence of polarization in the consumption and distribution of political news in online social media. Methods to effectively measure slant of news articles at a large scale are lacking in prior literature. To fill this gap, we propose a method to measure slant of individual news articles by observing their sharing patterns on Twitter. Our method monitors tweets about a news article and a set of landmark Democrat and Republican accounts on Twitter to estimate its slant. Our results show that the slant of news articles estimated by our method matches the slant estimated by crowd sourced workers.
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Steppat, Desiree, Laia Castro Herrero, and Frank Esser. "News Media Performance Evaluated by National Audiences: How Media Environments and User Preferences Matter." Media and Communication 8, no. 3 (August 24, 2020): 321–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i3.3091.
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Media fragmentation and polarization have contributed to blurring the lines between professional and non-professional journalism. Internationally, more fragmented-polarized media environments are often associated with the emergence of non-professional news providers, the weakening of journalistic standards, and the segmentation of audiences along ideological leanings. Furthermore, these environments are home to partisan and alternative news media outlets, some of which try to actively undermine the credibility of traditional mainstream media in their reporting. By following an audience-centric approach, this study investigates the consequences of more fragmented-polarized media environments and consumption habits on users’ perceptions of news media performance. We use online-survey data from five countries that differ in the extent of fragmentation and polarization in the media environment (CH = 1,859, DK = 2,667, IT = 2,121, PL = 2,536, US = 3,493). We find that perceptions of high news media performance are more likely to be expressed by citizens from less fragmented-polarized media environments. Positive perceptions of news media performance are also stronger among users of traditional media, and those who inform themselves in a more attitude-congruent manner. By contrast, citizens from more fragmented-polarized media environments and users of alternative news media tend to express less satisfaction with news media performance. Based on these results, we argue that perceptions of news media performance among news users are shaped by their individual media choices as well as by the composition of the news media environments that surrounds them.
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Chinn, Sedona, P. Sol Hart, and Stuart Soroka. "Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017." Science Communication 42, no. 1 (January 29, 2020): 112–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1075547019900290.
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Despite concerns about politicization and polarization in climate change news, previous work has not been able to offer evidence concerning long-term trends. Using computer-assisted content analyses of all climate change articles from major newspapers in the United States between 1985 and 2017, we find that media representations of climate change have become (a) increasingly politicized, whereby political actors are increasingly featured and scientific actors less so and (b) increasingly polarized, in that Democratic and Republican discourses are markedly different. These findings parallel trends in U.S. public opinion, pointing to these features of news coverage as polarizing influences on climate attitudes.
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Han, Jiyoung, and Christopher M. Federico. "Conflict-Framed News, Self-Categorization, and Partisan Polarization." Mass Communication and Society 20, no. 4 (April 11, 2017): 455–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2017.1292530.
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Zafeiris, Anna. "Opinion Polarization in Human Communities Can Emerge as a Natural Consequence of Beliefs Being Interrelated." Entropy 24, no. 9 (September 19, 2022): 1320. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24091320.
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The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities—the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics—has been a focus of interest for decades, both from theoretical and modelling points of view. Regarding modelling attempts, an entire scientific field—opinion dynamics—has emerged in order to study this and related phenomena. Within this framework, agents’ opinions are usually represented by a scalar value which undergoes modification due to interaction with other agents. Under certain conditions, these models are able to reproduce polarization—a state increasingly familiar to our everyday experience. In the present paper, an alternative explanation is suggested along with its corresponding model. More specifically, we demonstrate that by incorporating the following two well-known human characteristics into the representation of agents: (1) in the human brain beliefs are interconnected, and (2) people strive to maintain a coherent belief system; polarization immediately occurs under exposure to news and information. Furthermore, the model accounts for the proliferation of fake news, and shows how opinion polarization is related to various cognitive biases.
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Christensen, Bente, Daniel Laydon, Tadeusz Chelkowski, Dariusz Jemielniak, Michaela Vollmer, Samir Bhatt, and Konrad Krawczyk. "Quantifying Changes in Vaccine Coverage in Mainstream Media as a Result of the COVID-19 Outbreak: Text Mining Study." JMIR Infodemiology 2, no. 2 (September 20, 2022): e35121. http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/35121.
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Background Achieving herd immunity through vaccination depends upon the public’s acceptance, which in turn relies on their understanding of its risks and benefits. The fundamental objective of public health messaging on vaccines is therefore the clear communication of often complex information and, increasingly, the countering of misinformation. The primary outlet shaping public understanding is mainstream online news media, where coverage of COVID-19 vaccines was widespread. Objective We used text-mining analysis on the front pages of mainstream online news to quantify the volume and sentiment polarization of vaccine coverage. Methods We analyzed 28 million articles from 172 major news sources across 11 countries between July 2015 and April 2021. We employed keyword-based frequency analysis to estimate the proportion of overall articles devoted to vaccines. We performed topic detection using BERTopic and named entity recognition to identify the leading subjects and actors mentioned in the context of vaccines. We used the Vader Python module to perform sentiment polarization quantification of all collated English-language articles. Results The proportion of front-page articles mentioning vaccines increased from 0.1% to 4% with the outbreak of COVID-19. The number of negatively polarized articles increased from 6698 in 2015-2019 to 28,552 in 2020-2021. However, overall vaccine coverage before the COVID-19 pandemic was slightly negatively polarized (57% negative), whereas coverage during the pandemic was positively polarized (38% negative). Conclusions Throughout the pandemic, vaccines have risen from a marginal to a widely discussed topic on the front pages of major news outlets. Mainstream online media has been positively polarized toward vaccines, compared with mainly negative prepandemic vaccine news. However, the pandemic was accompanied by an order-of-magnitude increase in vaccine news that, due to low prepandemic frequency, may contribute to a perceived negative sentiment. These results highlight important interactions between the volume of news and overall polarization. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first systematic text mining study of front-page vaccine news headlines in the context of COVID-19.
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R. KhudaBukhsh, Ashiqur, Rupak Sarkar, Mark S. Kamlet, and Tom Mitchell. "We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization through Machine Translation." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 35, no. 17 (May 18, 2021): 14893–901. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i17.17748.
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Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a new methodology that offers a fresh perspective on interpreting polarization through the lens of machine translation. With a novel proposition that two sub-communities are speaking in two different "languages", we demonstrate that modern machine translation methods can provide a simple yet powerful and interpretable framework to understand the differences between two (or more) large-scale social media discussion data sets at the granularity of words. Via a substantial corpus of 86.6 million comments by 6.5 million users on over 200,000 news videos hosted by YouTube channels of four prominent US news networks, we demonstrate that simple word-level and phrase-level translation pairs can reveal deep insights into the current political divide -- what is "black lives matter" to one can be "all lives matter" to the other.
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Kaylor, Brian. "Likes, retweets, and polarization." Review & Expositor 116, no. 2 (May 2019): 183–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0034637319851508.
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A key part of today’s polarized society is the polarized and polarizing world of social media. Although social media platforms bring the potential of more democratic involvement, greater public dialogue, and faster flow of news and information, the dark side of such Web 2.0 platforms also should concern church leaders and theologians. Already-existing polarization in society leads to a polarized use of social media as individuals seek like-minded online communities. Social media, however, also adds to that polarization by providing echo chambers, and features of social media encourage speed over accuracy and more aggressive communication. Three ways in which social media both represents and adds to polarization in politics, society, and churches are balkanization, as people separate into homogenous, polarized communities, the speeding nature of communication that allows inaccurate and overly emotional information to spread, and the flaming that occurs as anonymity and depersonalization of these communication platforms encourage aggressive and even violent rhetoric.
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Pavlichenko, Larysa V. "POLARIZATION IN MEDIA POLITICAL DISCOURSE ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS." Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology 2, no. 24 (December 20, 2022): 214–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.32342/2523-4463-2022-2-24-18.
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The war unleashed by Russia in 2022 is widely presented in online versions of English-language newspapers; Ukraine is constantly in the epicentre of the world news. This study highlights political and ideological contexts of the war in Ukraine, the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of news according to an interdisciplinary approach considering the language as a social practice. The article highlights the polarization in the presentation of the events and the main actors entitled in the discursive strategies, representing the dichotomy In- versus Out-group. The study is aimed at the investigation of the ideological structures and their manifesting linguistic devices in political discourse based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of discursive strategies for constructing the images of Ukraine and Russia in the British and American press. The integrated Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to the research of the news to study the media discourse and the language, where CDA focuses on social practice, social power and ideology. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) is used to research the ideology of war images presented in the language of news reports. The relevance of this study determined by the aim is to show the main discursive strategies of polaeization in political media discourse. The research methods of the article combine three vectors of the analysis by Fairclough with explanatory tools (by van Dijk), and the elements of stylistic analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis. The illustrative material was collected by information search and continuous sample from the open access newspapers and magazines issued in the US and Great Britain (The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others). Conclusion. This research argues that polarisation is being demonstrated in the media discourse on the war in Ukraine in 2022. The taxonomy of the identified discursive strategies of polarization deployed in the media political discourse includes labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization, personalization and analogy, that can either be used singly or intervened. The discursive strategy of evidentiality is applied to authorities, officials, witnesses that are accepted as trustworthy sources of data; the number game strategy combined with victimization are verbalized by metaphoric simile, metonymy, enumerating and magnifying the numbers with the modifying adverbs; the strategy of hyperbole conveys the positive impression of the in-group and negative acts magnification of the out-group verbalized by metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy; the personalization strategy is deployed with the purpose of foregrounding the positive actions of the in-group that implies negative out-group actions; the strategy of analogy is applied in the comparison of the war in Ukraine and the struggle of the Ukrainians for their independence with other historical events. Linguistic means used to realize the discursive strategies of polarization include the conceptual metaphor, metonymy, simile, idioms, metaphtonymy, intertextual allusion and personification.
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Gonçalves-Segundo, Paulo Roberto. "Fake news, moral panic, and polarization in Brazil: A critical discursive approach." Linguistic Frontiers 5, no. 2 (September 1, 2022): 51–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/lf-2022-0013.
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Abstract This paper aims to discuss the motivations and effects of the production, distribution and interpretation of fake news stories, which draw on moral panics in contemporary Brazilian society. To do so, the article combines recent research on fake news, mainly from Media Studies, Sociology and Political Science, with the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective on meaning-making. The main hypothesis advanced is that this kind of fake news story lies in the tension between the evident and the absurd, as they seem to be oriented towards eliciting different readings and reactions from the endo and the exogroup. In terms of the endogroup, they may function as a means both to foster social cohesion and induce affective responses that intensify the dichotomization of identities. Regarding the exogroup, they may act as a means of drawing antagonism towards progressive groups and political parties, in a process that aims at diverting public debate to topics that not only keep the polarization aflame, but also shift the focus of attention away from the issues and policies that the neoconservative agenda deems problematic.
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Allen, Jennifer, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild, and Duncan J. Watts. "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem." Science Advances 6, no. 14 (April 2020): eaay3539. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539.
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“Fake news,” broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.
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Serrano-Contreras, Ignacio-Jesús, Javier García-Marín, and Óscar G. Luengo. "Measuring Online Political Dialogue: Does Polarization Trigger More Deliberation?" Media and Communication 8, no. 4 (October 8, 2020): 63–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i4.3149.
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In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing consolidation of different realms where citizens can deliberate and discuss a variety of topics of general interest, including politics. The comments on news posts in online media are a good example. The first theoretical contributions called attention to the potential of those spaces to build a <em>healthy </em>(civic and participatory) public sphere, going much deeper in the process of political dialogue and deliberation (Fung, Gilman, & Shkabatur, 2013; Lilleker & Jackson, 2008; O’Reilly, 2005; Stromer-Galley & Wichowski, 2011). Polarization has been configured as a constant feature of the quality of the mentioned dialogues, particularly in Mediterranean countries (polarized pluralists’ cases). One of the research challenges at the moment has to do with the scrutiny of polarization within the political deliberation provoked by news stories. The goal of this article is the analysis of political dialogue from the perspective of the polarization in the increasingly popular network YouTube, which is presenting very particular characteristics. Using a sample of almost 400,000 posted comments about diverse topics (climate change, the Catalonian crisis, and Political parties’ electoral ads) we propose an automated method in order to measure polarization. Our hypothesis is that the number of comments (quantitative variable) is positively related to their polarization (qualitative variable). We will also include in the examination information about the ideological editorial line of newspapers, the type of topic under discussion, the amount of traceable dialogue, etc. We propose an index to (1) measure the polarization of each comment and use it to show how this value has behaved over time; and (2) verify the hypothesis using the average polarization of comments for each video.
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Wiggins, Bradley E. "Navigating an Immersive Narratology." International Journal of E-Politics 8, no. 3 (July 2017): 16–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/ijep.2017070102.
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In direct response to the rise in fake news as a socio-cultural and political phenomenon, this article presents an analysis of the factors that may help to explain the reception of fake news. In addition, recent pronouncements made by the Trump White House seem to challenge the nature of an objective truth. An immersive narratology emphasizes that different universes of discourse can intermingle and overlap, with fact and fiction becoming difficult to distinguish in our increasingly mediated lives. A tenable definition of fake news is offered prior to exploring historical antecedents of fake news. Persuasion, construction, immersion, distribution, and polarization represent the core factors that demystify the reception of fake news regardless as to whether an individual believes a story. A concluding discussion offers a critical evaluation of the potential of fake news to augment the news media landscape in the coming years.
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Munger, Kevin, Mario Luca, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker. "The (Null) Effects of Clickbait Headlines on Polarization, Trust, and Learning." Public Opinion Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2020): 49–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaa008.
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Abstract “Clickbait” headlines designed to entice people to click are frequently used by both legitimate and less-than-legitimate news sources. Contemporary clickbait headlines tend to use emotional partisan appeals, raising concerns about their impact on consumers of online news. This article reports the results of a pair of experiments with different sets of subject pools: one conducted using Facebook ads that explicitly target people with a high preference for clickbait, the other using a sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects’ individual-level preference for clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines. Findings show that older people and non-Democrats have a higher “preference for clickbait,” but reading clickbait headlines does not drive affective polarization, information retention, or trust in media.
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Müller, Philipp, and Anne Schulz. "Facebook or Fakebook? How users’ perceptions of ‘fake news’ are related to their evaluation and verification of news on Facebook." Studies in Communication and Media 8, no. 4 (2019): 547–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/2192-4007-2019-4-547.
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Research suggests that Facebook’s reputation as a news source is in decline. One reason for this development might be found in how users perceive their own exposure to alleged ‘fake news’ - a phenomenon which has been strongly linked to Facebook in public debate. Using a quota survey of German Internet users (n = 743) we investigate how users’ self-perceived exposure to ‘fake news’ and the ‘fake news’ debate are related to their evaluation and verification of political information on Facebook. Results indicate that the evaluation of Facebook as a news source is independent of users’ perceptions of their total amount of exposure to ‘fake news’ or the ‘fake news’ debate. However, individuals who feel they encounter many ‘fake news’ from traditional news sources evaluate Facebook more positively. Contrary to that, those who believe that the ‘fake news’ they are exposed to originate in alternative sources evaluate Facebook less positively and also engage in verification behaviors more frequently. Moreover, verification is predicted by the overall level of perceived ‘fake news’ exposure and, most strongly, by exposure to the ‘fake news’ debate. Findings are discussed in light of recent research on news audience polarization.
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Darr, Joshua P., and Johanna L. Dunaway. "Resurgent Mass Partisanship Revisited: The Role of Media Choice in Clarifying Elite Ideology." American Politics Research 46, no. 6 (October 24, 2017): 943–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1532673x17735042.
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Elite polarization is at an all-time high. Has this division filtered down into the public, and is this trend being exacerbated by expanded media choice in the postbroadcast era? Using National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES) data from recent election cycles, we analyze the influence of news choice on individual-level perceptions of the ideologies of parties and partisan elites. We examine whether cable news choice shapes respondents’ ability to correctly identify Democrats as the more liberal party, and Republicans as more conservative. Using cross-sectional and panel data, we find that partisan news consumers—particularly those watching Fox News—are better able to identify the positions and ideologies of partisan elites. Partisan news may help citizens participate more effectively by helping them identify the ideological orientation of the major parties and candidates.
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Wichowsky, Amber, and Meghan Condon. "The effects of partisan framing on COVID-19 attitudes: Experimental evidence from early and late pandemic." Research & Politics 9, no. 2 (April 2022): 205316802210960. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20531680221096049.
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Political polarization has dominated news coverage of Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this research note, we report findings from two experimental studies, in which we present respondents with news stories about COVID-19 mitigation measures that emphasize partisan difference or accord. The stories present the same numeric facts about public opinion, but highlight either the partisan gap that existed at the time of the study, or the fact that large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats supported the measures at the time. Results from our first study, conducted late April 2020, show that a media frame drawing attention to shared concern across party lines produced a less polarized response to social-distancing restrictions than a frame that drew attention to partisan difference. Our findings suggest that the extensive media coverage about the red-blue divide in COVID-19 opinions reinforced partisan polarization. These results, however, did not replicate in a second study conducted much later in the pandemic. Qualitative data collected across the two studies demonstrate the degree to which polarization had rapidly become a dominant narrative in Americans’ thinking about COVID-19.
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Asker, David, and Elias Dinas. "Thinking Fast and Furious: Emotional Intensity and Opinion Polarization in Online Media." Public Opinion Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2019): 487–509. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfz042.
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Abstract How do online media increase opinion polarization? The “echo chamber” thesis points to the role of selective exposure to homogeneous views and information. Critics of this view emphasize the potential of online media to expand the ideological spectrum that news consumers encounter. Embedded in this discussion is the assumption that online media affects public opinion via the range of information that it offers to users. We show that online media can induce opinion polarization even among users exposed to ideologically heterogeneous views, by heightening the emotional intensity of the content. Higher affective intensity provokes motivated reasoning, which in turn leads to opinion polarization. The results of an online experiment focusing on the comments section, a user-driven tool of communication whose effects on opinion formation remain poorly understood, show that participants randomly assigned to read an online news article with a user comments section subsequently express more extreme views on the topic of the article than a control group reading the same article without any comments. Consistent with expectations, this effect is driven by the emotional intensity of the comments, lending support to the idea that motivated reasoning is the mechanism behind this effect.
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Weld, Galen, Maria Glenski, and Tim Althoff. "Political Bias and Factualness in News Sharing across more than 100,000 Online Communities." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 15 (May 22, 2021): 796–807. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18104.
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As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at scale is challenging due to the massive volume of content which is shared by millions of users across thousands of communities. Therefore, existing research has largely focused on specific communities or specific interventions, such as bans. However, understanding the prevalence and spread of misinformation and polarization more broadly, across thousands of online communities, is critical for the development of governance strategies, interventions, and community design. Here, we conduct the largest study of news sharing on reddit to date, analyzing more than 550 million links spanning 4 years. We use non-partisan news source ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check to annotate links to news sources with their political bias and factualness. We find that, compared to left-leaning communities, right-leaning communities have 105% more variance in the political bias of their news sources, and more links to relatively-more biased sources, on average. We observe that reddit users’ voting and re-sharing behaviors generally decrease the visibility of extremely biased and low factual content, which receives 20% fewer upvotes and 30% fewer exposures from crossposts than more neutral or more factual content. This suggests that reddit is more resilient to low factual content than Twitter. We show that extremely biased and low factual content is very concentrated, with 99% of such content being shared in only 0.5% of communities, giving credence to the recent strategy of community-wide bans and quarantines.
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Paul, Subhajit, and Uttam Kr Pegu. "Media Polarization and Assertion of Majoritarianism in Indian News Media." Journal of Communication and Media Studies 6, no. 2 (2021): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2470-9247/cgp/v06i02/1-12.
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Lillian Kemunto Omoke, Hellen K. Mberia, and Margaret Jjuuko. "ETHNIC POLARIZATION IN KENYA: LINGUISTIC FEATURES IN POLITICAL NEWS INTERVIEWS." Researchers World : Journal of Arts, Science and Commerce VII, no. 4(1) (October 1, 2016): 22–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.18843/rwjasc/v7i4(1)/03.
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Komanduri, Ravi K., Chulwoo Oh, Michael J. Escuti, and D. Jason Kekas. "18:3: Late-News Paper: Polarization Independent Liquid Crystal Microdisplays." SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers 39, no. 1 (2008): 236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1889/1.3069633.
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Khanjan, Alireza, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Abbas Eslami Rasekh, and Manoochehr Tavangar. "Ideological Aspects of Translating News Headlines from English to Persian." Meta 58, no. 1 (March 12, 2014): 87–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1023811ar.
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Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, the present paper attempts to investigate certain ideological aspects of news headlining in an English-Persian translation context. A number of parallel news headlines have been chosen for contrastive analysis, with a view to highlighting the different ideological apparatuses involved in the process of translation of news headlines. A qualitative analysis of the sample data suggests that the polarization of us and them is generally influenced by translators’/target news producers’ (dis)approval of the ideological content of the source headlines in question, and is represented through maintaining, manipulating or excluding original headlines in the target news stories. These translation strategies are typically realized through the purposeful application of linguistic expressions (both at lexical and grammatical levels) or non-linguistic elements (such as images, photos and graphic drawings).
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Suk, Jiyoun, David Coppini, Carlos Muñiz, and Hernando Rojas. "The more you know, the less you like: A comparative study of how news and political conversation shape political knowledge and affective polarization." Communication and the Public 7, no. 1 (December 28, 2021): 40–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20570473211063237.
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The contemporary communication ecology contributes to affective polarization by presenting us with extreme exemplars of disliked groups. News exposure that is associated with political discussion networks is related to greater political knowledge, yet unlike previous eras where political knowledge and tolerance went hand in hand, this is no longer the case. We employ a comparative design to examine this idea among two democracies with differing levels of journalistic professionalism and political system: Mexico and the United States. Results show that greater political knowledge is associated with affective polarization, especially for the United States. Furthermore, there was a significant indirect path between media use and affective polarization, mediated through homogeneous political talk and political knowledge, but not in Mexico.
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Ozer, Adam L., and Jamie M. Wright. "Partisan news versus party cues: The effect of cross-cutting party and partisan network cues on polarization and persuasion." Research & Politics 9, no. 1 (January 2022): 205316802210754. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20531680221075455.
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The pervasiveness of partisan media and the 24/7 news cycle allow ample opportunity for partisan-motivated reasoning and selective exposure. Nonetheless, individuals still frequently encounter out-party media outlets and expert pundits through mainstream news and social media. We seek to examine the effects of cross-cutting partisan outlet cues (e.g. Fox News, MSNBC) and direct party cues (e.g. Republican, Democrat) on citizens’ perceptions of ideology, source credibility, and news consumption. Using an experiment that pits outlet cues against direct party cues, we find that cross-cutting outlet and direct party cues lead citizens to perceive pundits as more ideologically moderate. As a result, respondents find out-party pundits on in-party outlets to be less biased, increasing interest in the pundits’ perspectives. However, while cross-cutting pundits gain among the out-party, they lose among the in-party. This trade-off holds important normative implications for individual news consumption and the ability of outlets and pundits to appear unbiased while garnering the largest possible audience.
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Provaznik, Daniel, and Jillian Wisniewski. "Modeling Diffusion of Information in an Increasingly Complex Digital Domain." Industrial and Systems Engineering Review 6, no. 2 (March 7, 2019): 126–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.37266/iser.2018v6i2.pp126-134.
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Offering entertainment, discussion, and information, social media provides users with a stimulating online experience. Within the last five years, it has also become an increasingly popular medium for the consumption of news. News outlets publish articles and reports through social media, and by doing so influence their users in a way that corresponds with the outlet’s political leaning. Because social media outlets provide users with tailored content, the prevalence of biased news reporting reinforces the user’s political values and polarizes their beliefs. This thesis attempts to examine the relationships that give rise to this political polarization in social media and discusses possible opportunities to mitigate it.
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Dahlgren, Peter M., Adam Shehata, and Jesper Strömbäck. "Reinforcing spirals at work? Mutual influences between selective news exposure and ideological leaning." European Journal of Communication 34, no. 2 (February 21, 2019): 159–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323119830056.
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The growth of partisan news sources has raised concerns that people will increasingly select attitude-consistent information, which might lead to increasing political polarization. Thus far, there is limited research on the long-term mutual influences between selective exposure and political attitudes. To remedy this, this study investigates the reciprocal influences between selective exposure and political attitudes over several years, using a three-wave panel survey conducted in Sweden during 2014–2016. More specifically, we analyse how ideological selective exposure to both traditional and online news media influences citizens’ ideological leaning. Findings suggest that (1) people seek-out ideologically consistent print news and online news and (2) such attitude-consistent news exposure reinforces citizens’ ideological leaning over time. In practice, however, such reinforcement effects are hampered by (3) relatively low overall ideological selective exposure and a (4) significant degree of cross-cutting news exposure online. These findings are discussed in light of selective exposure theory and the reinforcing spirals model.