Divide and Conquer: Online Media and the Polarizing Effect of Political Violence

• In Event: Social Media and Violence

Abstract

States and their challengers utilize a wide variety of mechanisms to coerce and constrain lines of social communication. In particular, it appears that events of collective violence can be utilized by conflict actors to disrupt existing lines of social communication, fragmenting and polarizing ethnic populations in an effort to solidify their political power. However, systematic examination of the effects of violent events on patterns of social communication has been hampered by an absence of high-resolution measurements. In this paper, I provide a new approach to this measurement problem, by utilizing novel geo-referencing algorithms combined with multi-scale kernel density estimation, applied to over 3 billion randomly sampled social media messages, to generate dynamic spatial estimates of shifts in the volume of social media traffic, which can then be compared to the location and timing of collective violence events observed over the same period. This evidence demonstrates that in the wake of collective violence events, ethnic communities experience systematic shifts in their patterns of social communication. In particular, such events are associated with heightened patterns of segregation in the communications between communities. This analysis thus provides direct evidence of the divisive effects of collective violence events on patterns of human social communication.

Author

• Camber Warren, Naval Postgraduate School