Social Media Is Polarized, Social Media Is Polarized

Abstract

Social media platforms have often been described as online spaces supporting political discourse. However, online discussions are often polarized; people tend to commune with those who are ideologically similar to them. The HCI response to this phenomenon has been to purposefully expose people to diverse viewpoints. This common design agenda is supported through analysis of link sharing, yet little attention has been paid to how users discuss these links. Therefore, the common design agenda may not mitigate polarization. We study the emergent discourse in 10 Finnish migration-related Facebook groups and examine how the same links are shared and discussed across anti-and pro-migration camps. Qualitative analysis of the posts and comments revealed that shared media links do not bridge polarized groups with regard to worldviews and opinions. We then demonstrate alternative design opportunities to resolve this issue and begin to develop a new design agenda to mitigate polarization.

Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment

“…To analyse the differences between social media platforms, we studied the contents of the most popular direct links on the five most active platforms in the refugee debate: Suomi24, Twitter, Facebook, Vauva.fi, and Hommaforum. The linking patterns on these platforms showed notable differences (see Table 5), suggesting that each of the platforms had particular sources they used in the discussion, again indicating the framing values that the users of that platform found central (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Nelimarkka et al., 2018).…”

“…However, networked framing always exists in a larger media ecology. To address this gap, mixed-method approaches can be used to understand both the content and structure of online media (Maier et al., 2018; Nelimarkka et al., 2018).…”

“Impossible” Activism and the Right to Be Understood: The Emergent Refugee Rights Movement in Finland

“…The in-depth interviews with activists, both asylum seekers and their Finnish allies, and the legacy media content have been analyzed using close reading (Lentricchia and DuBois 2003) in Atlas.ti. The big data material was collected from the Facebook API by means of a custom-built tool (https://github.com/HIIT/hybrasomeloader, see Nelimarkka et al 2018) and the material has been analyzed using close reading and computational methods, such as link analysis. The material was collected before Facebook implemented new regulations, forbidding data from public groups from being collected without the consent of the group administrator.…”

Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media Services

“…However, it is unclear if these approaches could mitigate polarization. Nelimarkka et al [77] in their critical reflection highlight how the common design agenda in polarization mitigation has been increasing contact across polarized groups. Their work in highly polarized social media discussions shows that such discussion may drive antisocial behaviors.…”

“…Given the context, we also choose to use concepts emerging from political science to design probes which manifested ideas how political parties relate to citizens, such as the difference between elite and mass parties [50] and differences between freedom and pluralism [110]. The first four probes previously used by [77,78] on studying citizens' perceptions of mitigating polarization, allowing us to build on this baseline work. Beyond these, we deepened our perspective on the political nature of the interfaces and party politics and designed four more probes to examine particularly differences between the participants from different political parties.…”