Polarization and the Pandemic: American Political Discourse, March – May 2020

Faris, Robert; Clark, Justin; Etling, Bruce; Kaiser, Jonas; Roberts, Hal; Schmitt, Carolyn; Tilton, Casey; Benkler, Yochai

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3721653

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Nevertheless, it was not until the 2016 election that Breitbart rose to prominence. As Faris et al (2017) documented, Breitbart shaped the entire media coverage of immigration and pulled many right-wing media outlets into Trump's orbit during the 2016 election, emerging as the nexus of the right-wing media sphere. Since Trump was elected, Breitbart remained influential on the political right.…”

Section: The Case Of Breitbartmentioning

confidence: 99%

How participatory propaganda operates through superusers: The effects of super commenters on Breitbart News

Yang¹,

Hsiao²

2023

Preprint

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Many right-wing media such as Breitbart produce propaganda. However, how their audiences participate in propaganda remains unknown. We advance the theory of “participatory propaganda” via investigating “super commenters” -- the top 5% of the most active commenters who produced more than 50% of the comments on Breitbart. Based on a textual analysis of 2.8 million comments, we show that super commenters commented early, instigated conversations, and amplified extremist, conspiratorial topics. Based on a survey experiment, we show that reading top-ranked comment threads involving super commenters entrenched the conspiratorial beliefs of like-minded readers and prompted them to share Breitbart articles on social media. Our findings reveal a multi-step process of participatory propaganda on right-wing media sites that involves elite cuing, selective amplification, and content diffusion.

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Section: The Case Of Breitbartmentioning

confidence: 99%

How participatory propaganda operates through superusers: The effects of super commenters on Breitbart News

Yang¹,

Hsiao²

2023

Preprint

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“…It uses automated methods, such as analysing Twitter users' political leaning through following-followers networks (Barberá, 2015), or classifying the political orientation of social media users and then the news sources they share online. An example of the latter approach is the Media Partisanship Attention Scores (MPAS) (Faris et al, 2017). Most of these approaches, however, are grounded in the U.S. bipolar political system and unsuitable for a multi-party system.…”

Section: Estimating Partisan Attention With Social Media Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research: Influence, Populism, Partisanship, Polarisation

Bruns,

Bechmann,

Charquero-Ballester

et al. 2023

SPIR

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Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of such partisanship by conspiracy theorists and state actors, there are substantial concerns about the way that extremist actors are utilising digital and social media logics to further their ideological agendas. The situation is further complicated by platform providers’ and regulators’ limited and unsystematic responses to these issues. But while there is considerable research into the various issues and events that illustrate these developments, many of the central concepts that are used to describe these cases receive substantially less critical attention. Terms such as ‘influence’, ‘populism’, ‘partisanship’, and ‘polarisation’ are often deployed as if did not themselves require further qualification and definition – even in spite of the considerable volume of literature in political science and other ancillary disciplines that addresses the various facets that such concepts may have. Informed by and building on substantial empirical research, this panel therefore facilitates a conversation between methodological innovation at the coalface of digital trace data analysis and careful reflection on the definitions of key concepts, in order to explore the conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches that might illuminate the distinct features of our four key concepts in sharper focus. Our first paper engages with the concept of influence, which it conceptualises as the power to affect others. Focussing especially on the spread of verified false content (VFC) through social media, it proposes a novel population-scale approach that both employs a bottom-up perspective for identifying the influential actors spreading such content, and highlights the exposure of ordinary citizens to these messages. It demonstrates this approach by drawing on the large-scale Facebook URL-sharing dataset available from Social Science One, developing an EU-wide perspective on VFC exposure at national levels. Our second paper continues this approach by critiquing the concept of populism, highlighting the term as a weak analytical concept. It argues that, rather than focussing on their populist stance, populist politicians can be judged by the extent of their delegitimising rhetoric. Further, the paper asserts that such rhetoric is enabled by the decentralised communication environment of social media. The utility of the concept of delegitimisation is that enables the identification of political messages that are truly dangerous because they are meant to destabilise fundamental democratic principles, such as the integrity of the vote and the legitimacy of alternative policy perspectives. By situating this in the context of social media messaging, we can see how such messages are amplified by distributed network channels. Our third paper shifts focus to the possible results of influence campaigns and populist demagoguery, and addresses the concept of partisanship. Taking as case study the 2022 Italian election, it introduces a novel combination of computationally informed analytical methods and applies them to social media data to gauge the level of partisan attention devoted to the different news sources and political topics in the election campaign, and distinguish between partisan and cross-partisan sources and themes. This provides new insights into the structures, intersections, and faultlines of partisanship, and enables the mapping of a broader multi-dimensional ideological space. Our final paper continues this discussion by exploring the complexities of polarisation. It highlights the conceptual fluidity of this term, which is expressed in the multitude of adjectives and qualifiers that can be found in the relevant literature – from ideological through affective to interactive polarisation and beyond, and from benign and even beneficial to pernicious and destructive polarisation. Mapping these distinct forms of polarisation onto a diverse range of mixed-methods digital media research approaches, and outlining a number of criteria for assessing whether the dynamics of polarisation have turned destructive, it outlines new pathways for polarisation research in Internet studies. In combination, then, these four papers offer a timely nudge for digital and social media research to revisit and reconsider some of the central concepts in online political communication studies, and to retrace and reaffirm the connections between the definitions of these concepts and the methodological frameworks that we use to study them.

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“…This gap is concerning in general, but especially in light of the current political and historical context. Amid intense partisan divide (Doherty, 2018) and racial injustice (Williams & Toldson, 2020), current political discourse among politicians and in the media not only lacks deliberation but exudes vitriol (Faris et al, 2020), all while young people bear witness. Educating students about how democracy works and what it demands of them as citizens must be a priority in schools and classrooms (Brighouse, 2018;Horsford, 2018).…”

Section: De For Democracy: Current Limitations and Future Possibilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratizing dual enrollment: Beyond economic rationales

Duncheon,

Hornbeck

2023

EPAA

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Dual enrollment (DE) is a popular reform in the United States that allows high school students to take college courses through partnerships between school districts and institutions of higher education. DE programs have been scaling rapidly, but participation is stratified by race and class, and research reveals little about the quality and content of DE courses. These limitations stem, in part, from a lack of theorizing around what purpose DE reform can and should serve, both in the lives of youth and for communities writ large. Situated in literature on the purpose of education in capitalist democracies, this study employs qualitative content analysis to examine the rationales for DE coursework, as depicted in state-level policy documents. Findings indicate that DE policy rationales are depicted almost entirely in neoliberal economic terms. We argue that, while economic benefits are important, the almost exclusive emphasis on economic outcomes has led to rapid scaling of a curricular reform with insufficient attention to teaching, learning, and equity. To maximize the potential benefits of DE reform, we call for imagining its democratic possibilities.

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Polarization and the Pandemic: American Political Discourse, March – May 2020

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

How participatory propaganda operates through superusers: The effects of super commenters on Breitbart News

How participatory propaganda operates through superusers: The effects of super commenters on Breitbart News

Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research: Influence, Populism, Partisanship, Polarisation

Democratizing dual enrollment: Beyond economic rationales

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