Ideological Segregation in a Politically Diverse Community: Evidence from China

• In Event: Bridging the Divide: Polarization, Ideology, Trust, and Conspiracy

Abstract

Individuals tend to gravitate toward different social media and networks that align with their preferred political stance. This phenomenon has negative implications for politics and society: "echo chambers" will be created as people engage primarily with like-minded groups, thereby causing ideological segregation. Scholars find strong evidence of ideological segregation in the context of television-based news consumption. This conclusion, however, does not necessarily indicate that ideological segregration is people's inherent goal, as political views of television programs in a specific channel are often pre-determined; once an audience member selects the specific channel, there is little room for creating ideological diversity.
In a different context, online communities such as online social networks, discussion forums, and knowledge markets make it easier for users to explore diverse political views within the same website. This provides a novel setting different from traditional television channels (e.g., CNN, Fox) that have much more politically homogeneous programs. Will this new setting change the old results of ideological segregation? This depends on whether segregation is chosen inherently by users or whether it could be changed by the environment of news and opinion consumption.
We collect nearly 100,000 comments under 200 most widely discussed politically related articles published on Zhihu, a Quora-type discussion forum based in China. Under each article, We study the segregation of two major types of ideologies: pro-official and anti-official. Here, "official" is referred to the Chinese government' political stance, encompassing specific views such as pro-China, anti-West, anti-NATO, pro-unification, pro-USSR, etc. Users have access to comments with both types of ideologies. Despite this setting, we find that ideological segregation is overwhelming on this seemingly diverse online community: Under "pro-official" articles, the majority of comments are also pro-official; under "anti-official" articles, the majority of comments are also anti-official. The segregration pattern is generally symmetric for the two ideological types, even given possible censorship in China. Overall, the degree of segregation is quantitatively similar to classical findings of ideological segregation in U.S. television channels.
We further delve into user behaviors and study the magnitude of efforts to break down ideological segregation. We have two major findings. First, the few users who attempt to break down segregation (i.e., making comments with a political view different from the article and most other comment makers) are often fiercely counterattacked. Second, evaluated based on measures of upvotes, the failure of breaking down segregation stems from people's lack of interest in even reading content with a different ideology. All of these findings suggest that ideological segregation is an outcome related to people's inherent choices, and the diversity of the online community does not help reduce segregation. Policymakers thus need to design more proactive interventions to increase exchanges of ideas and views, which, however, might cause conflicts with online community companies' economic goals.

Author

• Dafeng Xu, University of Washington
  Presenting Author