Propaganda-Induced Opinion Polarization in COVID-19 on Chinese Social Media

• In Event: Political Communication and COVID Beliefs

Abstract

The heavy reliance on social media during COVID-19 for information consumption has expedited the far-reaching spread of an “infodemic” that blends misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech, resulting in drastically differing perceptions of the pandemic. A conventional assumption that has long underlain the understandings of polarization is that polarization is inherent to electoral democracies. Our study challenges this assumption by demonstrating that, under a single-party state, despite the strict management of the media and predominant propaganda, public opinion still diverges significantly in line with latent ideological differences. Moreover, we aim to understand the influences of the thriving propaganda through online echo chambers. To what extent do the latent ideological differences in the party-state, if any exist, manifest themselves through social media? How does the state propaganda interact with social media to reduce or induce polarization in the digital public sphere?

We seek to advance the understandings of this social media-induced polarization in a largely underexplored non-Western context. We propose a higher-order theoretical framework that conceptualizes polarization as the intersection between cognitive, social psychological, informational, and political processes (CSIP). This framework enables us to examine diverse causes of polarization through a comparative lens. Central to our framework is that social media facilitate the self-selection of cognitively consistent information, homophily, and newsfeeds largely according to the partisan divide in electoral democracies while, in parallel, enabling selective exposure to propaganda in single-party state. Consequently, governmental propaganda, which aims to create consensus, may instead alienate those with contrasting prior beliefs, which in turn creates a paradox of propaganda that exacerbates opinion polarization. This is the distinct mechanism of polarization via social media in the party-state that we will demonstrate in this paper.

We acquired a novel dataset that contains the entire, uncensored set of original posts related to COVID-19 in the early stage of the pandemic on China’s major social media website Sina Weibo. We focused on 12,515 verified accounts and examined 559,7472 posts and reposts about four highly controversial topics that had generated nationwide debate. We find that the Chinese elites hold drastically differing views about contested issues, with a majority leaning toward the right – the liberals – when the pandemic arose. Whereas mainstream opinions have shifted toward the left, over time, the ideological cleavage between elites has grown significantly. Our findings further show that state propaganda has shifted the elites toward the positions closer to the government, yet the effect is more pronounced for elites who hold moderate opinions. Those who lean toward the right and strong opinion holders remain unpersuaded. Our results suggest that propaganda has driven a wedge between moderate elites and right-leaning ones, hence the propaganda has increased, rather than attenuated, the polarization. This research reveals the pervasiveness of the pandemic-induced ideological divisions far beyond electoral democracies that have been wrestling with polarized party politics. Under a single-party state, there existed significantly various polarized discourses during the early stage of COVID-19, presenting a tale of two pandemics in cyber-China.

Authors

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University

• Siyao ZHENG, Tsinghua University

• Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University