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The sentiment of the overall conversation was consistent with scientific evidence. These findings demonstrate an online environment where scientific evidence online drives vaccine information outside of the vaccine-hesitant community but is also prominently used and misused within the robust vaccine-hesitant community. Future communication efforts should take current context into account; more information may not prevent vaccine hesitancy.

This chapter reviews the political science literature on polarization, showing that polarization in American politics long precedes the internet and results primarily from asymmetric political-elite-driven dynamics. This chapter first considers the polarization of political elites and the public before discussing how social identity begets party affiliation that helps explain why polarization can take on such deeply affective negative responses to partisans of the other party. The chapter shows that party elites, in particular elected representatives, have experienced significant party polarization in the sense that liberals and conservatives have mostly sorted themselves into Democrats and Republicans, respectively, and that the most visible component of this move was the realignment of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party. The broader population, if it has polarized at all, has polarized affectively—in the way it feels about the other party—rather than ideologically, or the practical policy preferences it holds.

This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological.

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