Did COVID-19 Blur Partisan Boundaries? A Comparison of Partisan Affinity and Source Heterophily in Online Alternative News-Sharing Networks Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

IF 5.5 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2023-07-01 DOI:10.1177/20563051231192963

Jakob Baek Kristensen, Frederik Møller Henriksen, Eva Mayerhöffer

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study explores partisan and group heterophily within cross-platform online communities that share alternative news media content in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Austria. The analysis is related to the emergence of anti-systemic cross-partisan counter-publics in Europe that have gained momentum with the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent resistance against government restrictions. Comparing two periods (before and after the outbreak of COVID-19), we investigate whether these developments foster cross-partisan information sharing in online communities that form around right-wing, left-wing, and anti-systemic alternative news media content. Drawing on a network-analytical approach, we study networks formed around URL sharing of alternative news content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and VKontakte. Data include 30 million social media posts from January 2019 to September 2021. The results show that overall source heterophily in online alternative news networks increases slightly with the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly due to the increased proliferation of anti-system news. This increase is, however, not an expression of a more profound collapse of bi-partisan, left-right cleavages and is contingent on country contexts. Except for the time of the initial outbreak, the overall sharing of COVID-19-related content tends to increase rather than decrease partisan homophily. Finally, the results show that non-bi-partisan, anti-system media have had a significant effect on alternative media information ecosystems during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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新冠肺炎是否模糊了党派界限？新冠肺炎大流行前后在线替代新闻共享网络的党派亲和性和来源异质性比较

本研究探讨了丹麦、瑞典、德国和奥地利共享另类新闻媒体内容的跨平台在线社区中的党派和群体异质性。该分析与欧洲出现的反系统性跨党派反公众有关，这些反公众随着新冠肺炎的爆发以及随后对政府限制的抵制而获得势头。比较两个时期（新冠肺炎爆发前后），我们调查这些发展是否促进了围绕右翼、左翼和反系统的替代新闻媒体内容形成的在线社区中的跨党派信息共享。利用网络分析方法，我们研究了围绕Facebook、Instagram、Twitter、Reddit、Telegram、TikTok、YouTube和VKontakte的替代新闻内容URL共享形成的网络。数据包括2019年1月至2021年9月的3000万条社交媒体帖子。结果表明，随着新冠肺炎大流行，在线替代新闻网络的总体来源异质性略有增加，主要是由于反系统新闻的扩散增加。然而，这一增长并不是两党、左右分歧更深刻崩溃的表现，而是取决于国家背景。除了最初爆发的时候，与COVID-19相关内容的总体共享倾向于增加而不是减少党派同性恋。最后，研究结果表明，在新冠肺炎大流行期间，非两党、反系统媒体对替代媒体信息生态系统产生了显著影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

9.20

自引率

3.80%

发文量

111

审稿时长

12 weeks

期刊介绍： Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.