The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Abstract

This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.

Online Climate Change Polarization: Interactional Framing Analysis of Climate Change Blog Comments

“…Thus, most framing differences were further polarized as users reaffirmed or even upgraded their own framing. This finding adds to our understanding of polarization in the climate change blogosphere (Brüggeman et al, 2020;Elgesem, 2019;Elgesem et al, 2015;Van Eck et al, 2019). The risk of frame polarization is that users keep reinforcing their own framing and are therefore unable to resolve framing differences (Dewulf & Bouwen, 2012).…”

“…In the current research, we specifically focus on user comments in the climate change blogosphere, as previous research pointed out that this online venue is polarized to the extent of communities, hyperlinks, topics, and discourses (Brüggeman et al, 2020;Elgesem, 2019;Elgesem et al, 2015). Climate change blogs are "websites that primarily and frequently produce content about climate change with dated entries in a reverse chronological order and possibly a comment section" (Van Eck et al, 2019, p. 2).…”

Climate Change Risk Perceptions of Audiences in the Climate Change Blogosphere

“…Next to that, there are various communities of bloggers that support the scientific consensus on climate change ("climate mainstream bloggers") [7], for example climate scientists that blog to correct misinformation on climate change [11]. Previous studies showed that persistent polarization around climate change manifests itself in online communities and topics [7], hyperlinking [12,13], bloggers' operationalization of journalistic norms [11], discursive constructions of reality [14,15], and interaction strategies in comment threads [16] of the climate change blogosphere. Importantly, to date, little research has focused on audiences in the climate change blogosphere.…”

Echo Chamber Effects in the Climate Change Blogosphere

“…The role of bloggers and commenters in processes of polarization in the climate change blogosphere has been extensively investigated. Echo chamber effects and polarization around climate change strongly manifest in blog posts (Brüggeman et al, 2020;Elgesem et al, 2015;Kaiser, 2017;Poberezhskaya, 2018), hyperlinking (Elgesem, 2019;Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017), and interactions in comment threads (Edwards, 2013;Van Eck et al, 2020). Moreover, blogs form an integral part of sceptics' communication strategy (Lewandowsky et al, 2019).…”