Measuring Ideologically-Based Responses (original) (raw)
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Secular vs. Islamist polarization in Egypt on Twitter
2013
We use public data from Twitter, both in English and Arabic, to study the phenomenon of secular vs. Islamist polarization in Twitter. Starting with a set of prominent seed Twitter users from both camps, we follow retweeting edges to obtain an extended network of users with inferred political orientation. We present an in-depth description of the members of the two camps, both in terms of behavior on Twitter and in terms of offline characteristics such as gender. Through the identification of partisan users, we compute a valence on the secular vs. Islamist axis for hashtags and use this information both to analyze topical interests and to quantify how polarized society as a whole is at a given point in time. For the last 12 months, large values on this "polarization barometer" coincided with periods of violence. Tweets are furthermore annotated using hand-crafted dictionaries to quantify the usage of (i) religious terms, (ii) derogatory terms referring to other religions, and (ii) references to charitable acts. The combination of all the information allows us to test and quantify a number of stereo-typical hypotheses such as (i) that religiosity and political Islamism are correlated, (ii) that political Islamism and negative views on other religions are linked, (iii) that religiosity goes hand in hand with charitable giving, and (iv) that the followers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are more tightly connected and expressing themselves "in unison" than the secular opposition. Whereas a lot of existing literature on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution is largely of qualitative and descriptive nature, our contribution lies in providing a quantitative and datadriven analysis of online communication in this dynamic and politically charged part of the world.
Ideological Congruence and Social Media Text as Data
Representation, 2019
Earlier studies on ideological congruence mostly rely on public opinion surveys to measure voter ideology , while politicians' ideology is measured by instruments such as roll call votes, expert surveys, and legislative texts. One crucial problem with such approaches is that the tools used to measure the elites' ideology are not identical to those used to measure the voters' ideology. The rapid growth of social media use offers a unique opportunity to directly examine the ideological overlap of elites and the electorate on a common platform using a common technique. This study examines over four million Twitter posts by legislative candidates from four major Turkish parties and their supporters between 2012 and 2016. After applying machine-learning algorithms to clean non-political content from the data, we employ Wordfish text scaling technique to extract the policy positions and compare the party positions to those of other parties and to those of their supporters.
, it had been assumed that Tunisians form a homogenous community in which all citizens are united around common cultural values and principles. Yet, after the Revolution and especially with the Islamist party " Ennahdha " in power, it has been explored that this 'idealistic' image of homogeneity has proved to be a utopian idea, an idea that was rather constructed by the former manipulative system of dictatorship. Instead, the Post-Revolution era has been characterized mainly by the striking division within the Tunisian society. This division consists in the existence of two polarized groups, namely Secularists/Liberals and Islamists/Conservatives. Motivated by the newly acquired freedom of speech, these two groups who used to co-exist in a " supposedly " peaceful atmosphere in the Pre-Revolution period have turned to voice their views about each other not only in broadcast settings but also in virtual social media spaces like " Facebook ". These views seem to reveal the conflicting relationship of the two groups. Adopting Fairclough's research methodology in CDA and Van Dijk's Socio-cognitive approach to discourse, the present paper seeks to explore the ways in which the Secularists represent their Islamist rivals on their Facebook pages resorting to a number of Secular intellectuals' posts on Islamists as evidence.
2021
This paper aims at understanding the dynamics underlying toleration as a complex social phenomenon and its pattern on Facebook during the June 30th revolution in Egypt. Thanks to the huge advances in ICT, internet-mediated research (IMR) has become one of the most prominent research methodologies in social sciences. Discussions on social network sites cannot be neglected in studying the dynamics complex and emerging social phenomena such as changes in public opinion, culture, attitudes and virtues.,To fulfill this aim, the researchers used web content analysis as a method inside IMR paradigm to analyze the discussions on Tamarrod’s Facebook page in the period from June 30th to July 5th and to examine the emerging overall pattern of toleration.,The results show indications that toleration is inherent in the Egyptian culture, and that the Egyptian society still keeps its reputation as a highly tolerant society, even in crises periods where tensions are witnessed everywhere. Moreover, ...
Social media brings to the fore new opinion leaders. Due to their supposed role in public debate as well as persuasion and promotion of opinions and new behaviours among users of such networks, they are called Influences. In the last few decades, communication research has explored opinion leaders as effective influences on their environments and societies. They present and interpret information, give opinions and adopt innovation before the audience, in addition to mediating between the audience and media in the communication process. More particularly, Facebook represents a new space for discussion in the Arab World. The phenomenon spread during the Arab Spring in 2011 and even expanded later. It took different forms, like the transfer of information, interpretation of incidents, and mobilization for mass events, political and cultural polarization and new critical discourse. However, what is taking place in cyberspace is still debatable. The present study looks into the new opinion leaders' phenomenon in the Arab public sphere and their part in political and religious polarization. The discourse of posts on three Facebook accounts of new opinion leaders (Influences) in Jordan is analysed. As these figures play disparate roles in national political and cultural events and dilemmas, lessons can be derived from such a rising phenomenon. The study aims at exploring the discourse features of the posts addressing public issues which sparked widespread controversies in the period 2017-2018, such as the civil state, theocratic state, school curriculum reform and political reform in Jordan. Study has found that the new opinion leaders' phenomenon on social media in Jordan is on the rise, in terms of political and religious polarization. That would reveal some characteristics and roles of new opinion leaders, in addition to the features of their discourse with reference to major political and religious issues and values as well as political and religious polarization.
Ideology in the Age of the Internet
Since the early 1990s when the internet began to enter the household, there has been a good deal of talk about how this new technology would alter the nature of politics (Poster; Negroponte; Strangelove; cf. Holmes). The internet, we were told, would revolutionize democracy, generating a greater inclusiveness and a revitalization of the public sphere. And there can be little doubt that since its inception there has been a great deal of critique of existing social conditions transmitted over the internet, but this cannot itself be said to generate a more democratic world. In the following, I would like to suggest that there may be structural reasons why the internet has not lived up to its proclaimed potential and why the internet, rather than countering ideological tendencies inherent in broadcast media, enhances them. One of the standard formulations of the concept of ideology claims that ideology is discourse in the interests of the dominant class (cf. Eagleton). The formulation is misleading. It suggests that there is a simple split within discourse between dominating and dominated that corresponds to a division within society (Lefort). Assumed is a correspondence that is not itself caught up in the process of representation. Too often what this means is that discourse that has the appearance of being opposed to the dominant class is taken at face value to be non-ideological discourse. This has become something of a commonplace in the context of cultural studies and is usually tied to a revision of Gramsci's notion of hegemony
This chapter focuses on the manifestation of ideology in social media interaction, both in explicit contestation and in implicit frameworks. Following a discussion of the key concepts of ideology and discourse, three exemplary studies are presented that show how ideology can be investigated in different ways and on different scales, from looking at blogs and forums, where ideologies are the explicit topics of research, to trolling on Twitter, where ideology is enacted in the way users respond to specific users and topics. Finally, we discuss key methodological issues and controversies in the study of ideology in social media.
Ideological Scaling of Social Media Users: A Dynamic Lexicon Approach
Political Analysis
Words matter in politics. The rhetoric that political elites employ structures civic discourse. The emergence of social media platforms as a medium of politics has enabled ordinary citizens to express their ideological inclinations by adopting the lexicon of political elites. This avails to researchers a rich new source of data in the study of political ideology. However, existing ideological text-scaling methods fail to produce meaningful inferences when applied to the short, informal style of textual content that is characteristic of social media platforms such as Twitter. This paper introduces the first viable approach to the estimation of individual-level ideological positions derived from social media content. This method allows us to position social media users—be they political elites, parties, or citizens—along a shared ideological dimension. We validate the proposed method by demonstrating correlation with existing measures of ideology across various political contexts and ...
Ideological and language polarization in online political discourse. The White House Facebook page
Abstract – This essay explores contemporary political discourse in Computer-mediated communication by analysing the language used in the public discussions on the White House Facebook page during the 2014 State of the Union address, delivered by President Barack Obama. After addressing the notion of the “public sphere” in the context of social networks and political communication in them, the essay looks at the nature of the language of the discussion in a representative corpus of users’ comments. It has been observed that most comments lack coherence and relevance and no constructive dialogue can be built, as many comments consist in insults. The deep ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans, broadly coincident with Pro-Obama and Anti-Obama users, is then viewed in semantic terms by analysing the corpus with the LIWC software. The resulting picture is that of an “argument culture” in which failure in social communication seems to be the most distinctive feature. Riassunto – Questo saggio esplora il discorso politico contemporaneo nella Comunicazione mediata dal computer attraverso l’analisi del linguaggio utilizzato nelle discussioni pubbliche sulla pagina Facebook della Casa Bianca durante il discorso sullo stato dell’Unione del 2014 tenuto dal presidente statunitense Barack Obama. Dopo aver discusso il concetto di “opinione pubblica” nel contesto dei social networks e la comunicazione politica in essi, viene analizzato il linguaggio della discussione sviluppatasi in un corpus rappresentativo di commenti di utenti. Si rileva come la maggior parte dei commenti non abbiano rilevanza e coerenza, e non emerge alcun tipo di discussione costruttiva, anche perché buona parte dei commenti al discorso di Obama consiste in insulti. La profonda divisione ideologica tra Democratici e Repubblicani, che in larga parte coincidono con i gruppi di utenti pro-Obama e anti-Obama, emerge poi in termini semantici attraverso l’analisi del corpus con il software LIWC. Il quadro che emerge e quella di una “cultura del conflitto” in cui l’impossibilità nella comunicazione sembra il tratto più distintivo.
Social Media + Society
Political polarization, seen as a key threat to contemporary democracy, has been tied to the rise of digital social media. However, how this process develops in the context of a social media environment characterized by multiple platforms—with differing norms, contents, and affordances—has not been sufficiently explored. In the present article, we propose a distinction between positional polarization, that is, people’s view on a political issue, and interpretative polarization, that is, how that political issue is contextualized and understood. We use this distinction to examine an issue of political controversy in Israel, examining how polarization develops over time, on three social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. We find that contrasting positions are strongly connected to conflicting interpretations, both of which are clear from the start, with only minor overtime shifts. Moreover, while sharing broad similarities, the three platforms show a few distinctive pola...