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New data shows that since the end of 2020, the polarization of online political discourse has remained basically unchanged. If you have seen the Internet completely in the past year, this may not be surprising. But the data also shows a potential pattern in which personal topics—such as abortion and immigration—take turns driving differences. Although people have been angry about political issues online, the issues that sparked the discussion have changed dramatically during the year.
The data comes from a joint project between social media intelligence platform Zignal Labs and the University of Southern California, and helps explain why political discourse may look like a never-ending carousel of anger in 2021.
data
Zignal and USC teamed up to create Polarization index, It measures participation in polarized content on Twitter and calculates a polarization score. Since the index started tracking conversations last year, major political events have occurred, such as the January 6 rebellion, the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, and the introduction of most of the covid-19 vaccine. The PI score has hardly changed since then.
Although Twitter is far from the perfect representative of broader disagreements, online platforms play an extremely important role in shaping political discourse. Social media platforms such as Meta (formerly Facebook) have received attention again this year, leading to new doubts about the ethics of these platforms and how they address online misinformation, extremism, and hate speech.
There has been a long debate in academia on how to measure polarization, and no clear standard has yet emerged. The index averages polarization scores on a scale of 1 to 100 for 10 political themes – immigration, policing, racial equality, abortion, voting integrity, gun legislation, climate change, minimum wages, covid-19 vaccines, and healthcare reforms (100 is absolute polarization. The polarization score is calculated by combining the amount of news link sharing on Twitter with the bias and reliability rating of the media source that posted the shared content. Compared with the share of more concentrated sources, the scope of political bias is more polarized.”
Group media resources based on bias and reliability from Advertising source media deviation chart, An independent news content rating company that determines political orientation and assesses reliability based on original factual reports.
Why does the Internet feel so bad this year
The polarization index has a score of 85.5 at the end of 2020, which researchers call the “critical” level. At the beginning of 2021, the score dropped by only 3 points and has remained stable since then.
Currently, immigration is the most polarized topic measured by the index, followed by police policy, racial equality, and gun legislation. At the topic level, changes in polarization are more common, and the degree of polarization seems to shift from one topic to another, thus keeping the overall score high.
For example, voting integrity was the second most controversial issue in the fourth quarter of 2020, then dropped to sixth out of 10 points, and rose back to fifth in the second half of 2021.
Research published with the Polarization Index also found that news articles on the most polarizing topics are more likely to come from unreliable right-leaning sources. According to the report, “contact with right-leaning sources is more likely to push the conversation in an increasingly polarized direction.”
Taking immigration as an example, this is the most polarizing topic: from the end of 2020 to the third quarter of 2021, right-leaning sources of low and medium reliability began to dominate the conversation, and the polarization score rose from 84.8 to 100.3 in the year. This model is consistent with other highly polarized themes.
What will happen
Consistent with Zignal’s research results, there is ample evidence that more extreme content tends to be more misleading.
Anya Schiffrin, director of the Technology, Media and Communication Program at Columbia University, said: “A lot of false information is top-down. It comes from the head of state, it comes from politicians.” Schiffrin also blamed the problem on the lack of “gatekeepers” to monitor content flow. . instead, Algorithmic recommendation systems on social media platforms tend to amplify extreme materials, Schiffrin said this would lead to a more “extreme Internet.”
This year’s extreme digital environment has led to a dramatic display of real-world violence.Examples of this relationship include Facebook’s role in the violence following the coup in Myanmar and U.S. Uprising on January 6, This is the result of a series of false information about the election results.
At the request of the MIT Technology Review, Zignal conducted an analysis that specifically studied how people interact with different media sources over time on election confidence and voter integrity issues. The data shows that, before and after the election and the January 6th incident, the less reliable sources of the left and the right have the highest participation.
By the end of 2020, contact with less reliable right-leaning sources in particular dominated online conversations about voter integrity. This was also the time when voters scored the highest in the polarization of integrity, reaching 95 points. According to the report, the high level of discord driven by voter honesty disagreements “leaded to the incident at the Capitol on January 6.”
It is worth noting that highly reliable right-leaning sources accounted for only 0.017% of the total participation of voters on honesty topics, while highly reliable left-leaning sources accounted for approximately 36%.
According to a Pew Research Center At the end of November 2020, 79% of Trump voters said that the 2020 presidential election did not work well, compared with 6% of Biden voters.
Another election year is approaching, and the dialogue about the health of American democracy is To be at the forefront again, Bringing new pressure to social media.
Some Reasons for optimismHowever, it can be found on the other side of the Atlantic.The EU is studying two major bills in the first half of 2022, called Digital Service Act and Digital Market Act, Led by the French government. These bills are designed to combat hate speech and potential advertising models, which are often considered to be one of the most basic challenges to preventing the spread of misinformation.
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