ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to investigate the temporal association between cyberbalkanization and real life polarization of public opinion during the Hong Kong Occupy Movement in 2014. 1,387 Facebook Pages about Hong Kong during July 1 to December 15, 2014 were collected, their publicly accessible posts were retrieved, and a post sharing network (1,397 nodes and 41,404 edges) was constructed. Network communities were computationally extracted to determine the community membership for each Facebook page. Daily degree of cyberbalkanization was quantified with the number of sharings through strong ties (intra-community sharing) connections. The level of political polarization was derived from the opinion polls data with the proportion of respondents who gave extreme ratings to the government leader in Hong Kong. In a time series analysis, the daily degree of cyberbalkanization, as measured by the number of sharing through the strong ties, was significantly associated with the level of political polarization, particularly with the younger age group's opinion poll result. This is the first study that provides empirical evidence for supporting cyberbalkanization to serve as a leading predictive indicator of the polarization of public opinion for at least 10 days ahead, suggesting that social media data analysis can supplement traditional public opinion research methods, such as phone survey, during social controversy.
- Barberá, P. 2014. How social media reduces mass political polarization, evidence from Germany, Spain, and the US. working paper.Google Scholar
- Farrell, H. 2012. The consequences of the internet for politics. Annual Review of Political Science. 15, (2012), 35--52.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hollander, B.A. 2008. Tuning out or tuning elsewhere? Partisanship, polarization, and media migration from 1998 to 2006. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 85, 1 (2008), 23--40.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sunstein, C.R. 2009. Republic. com 2.0. Princeton University Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wong, W. and Chan, S. 2015. You are what you read: How the digital divide changes the political views of people in hong kong. {In chinese}. Ming Pao. (January 17 2015).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Predicting Political Polarization from Cyberbalkanization: Time series analysis of Facebook pages and Opinion Poll during the Hong Kong Occupy Movement
Recommendations
Political Polarization and Platform Migration:: A Study of Parler and Twitter Usage by United States of America Congress Members
WWW '21: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021Growing dissatisfaction with platform governance decisions at major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has led to a number of substantial efforts, originating both on the political right and the political left, to shift to new ...
An Automatic Method for Understanding Political Polarization Through Social Media
Knowledge Science, Engineering and ManagementAbstractUnderstanding political polarization is an important problem when one studies the culture of a democratic country. As a platform for discussing social issues, social media such as Twitter contains rich information about political polarization. In ...
(Re)Design to Mitigate Political Polarization: Reflecting Habermas' ideal communication space in the United States of America and Finland
Social Media platforms are increasingly being used for political activities and communication, and research suggests that social media design and use is contributing to the polarization of the public sphere. This study draws on Habermas' ideals ...
Comments