From Filter Bubble to Social Cleavage: Online Polarisation across Nations

• In Event: Communicating Politics on Twitter

Abstract

The idea that social networks deepen polarisation by creating “filter bubbles” around their users which exclude competing political ideas is one of the most persistent, albeit contentious, criticisms of the role of technology in modern politics. While rising social network usage is an international phenomenon, however, the nature of political polarisation varies significantly among countries. Though there are prominent cases of nations where political polarisation extends into other realms of social life – with divisions in political identity also being replicated in citizens’ other identities, thus threatening to ossify into a social cleavage – in other nations even deep political divisions are not reflected in other social divisions, implying that citizens’ engagement with one another in other spheres of life are largely unimpeded by political differences. This variance among nations reveals a limitation of existing analysis of “filter bubbles”, which has focused users’ engagement with political and news media accounts to the exclusion of considering their participation in other social networks and spheres.

Our research uses Twitter data from a variety of developed nations across Europe and East Asia to examine the full range of social spheres in which users participate – not just the political or news media accounts they follow, but also their revealed preferences in music, movies, sports, celebrities, food and so on – and employs network analysis to uncover the extent to which their political polarisation is mirrored by polarisation in other social spheres. By treating social media as a multi-dimensional space in which individuals express and reveal many different aspects of their identities, we show how differing political views are linked to diverging social identities to a significantly different extent in cross-country comparison. In addition, by focusing on individual countries we can see which spheres of social life are most segregated along the lines of political identity and which continue to provide opportunities for citizens to engage with peers who hold different political views. As well as furthering our understanding of how polarisation functions in different national contexts, this insight may also point at promising starting points for projects aiming to bridge political divides in polarised countries.

Authors

• Robert Andrew Fahey, Waseda University

• Stefano Camatarri, Université catholique de Louvain