Networked Partisanship: Using Framing to Measure Polarisation on Social Media

使用Facebook和Twitter(以下统称为“社交媒体”)进行政治言论，被认为直接助长了在线社区的党派分化。如果可以证实，这一发展有可能重新定义英国政治领域的公共辩论。为了衡量这一感知到的现象，需要研究社交媒体对政治行为者、新闻媒体和公众之间的话语关系的变革效应，这定义了公共领域的政治问题。首先，新闻和观点是由一系列意识形态多样化的政治和新闻媒体来源产生的。其次，社交媒体用户以互动的方式体验新闻，并通过共享的主观观点和情感表达来集体回应政治信息。政治信息传播方式的这些变化表明，社交媒体上的公众舆论是通过新闻制作者和受访者公众之间的互动对话来建立的。然而，目前的学术研究并没有对这种隐含的联系进行连贯的研究。“精英”新闻来源(政客、政党、记者和新闻机构的社交媒体资料)和公众对政治内容的反应(包括话语两极分化)的影响力主要是相互独立地研究的。为了解决这一缺失，这项研究提出了一种开创性的方法，以检验对政治问题的看法如何在社交媒体上的新闻来源和公共对话中产生共鸣。通过从整体上考虑政治、新闻媒体和公关人员之间话语中党派观点的扩散，它将揭示国家层面上政治两极分化的程度。该项目的范围、长度和独特的设计将对学术做出重大贡献，解决以英国为基础的研究的匮乏问题。来自精英来源的新闻文章和社交媒体帖子，以及公众用户关于英国政治中三个最突出的问题(由民意调查定义)的帖子/评论将在18个月内收集，并进行分析，以共享政治评估，即“框架”。框架是通过媒介话语传达的对社会问题的理解。在政治术语中，它们指的是察觉到的问题、其原因和对情况的判断的组合。使用找到常用词汇和它们出现的上下文的软件，将精英来源中表达的突出“问题”和“原因”的识别制成数据点(“编码”)。文本分析软件将被用来衡量这些问题和原因之间的积极和消极联系(“情绪”)。这将在统计上表明一种评估性判断，从而完成框架。利用先进的量化方法(如层次聚类分析)，我们将发现跨媒体资源的有影响力的框架。一旦使用这种方法发现了常见政治论点的词汇和语义结构，公共用户的社交媒体帖子就会被比较，看看哪些框架是互惠的，从而在社交媒体对话中产生共鸣。结果将表明，英国社交媒体是否存在党派分化并产生影响。还将评估一种假设：精英来源的意识形态新闻生产，以及由共同意见和情感联合起来的集体公共回应，将鼓励更广泛地传播党派观点4/23。更深入地了解党派观点是如何通过社交媒体传播的，将发现它在民间社会中的应用，为对社会关切作出建设性的回应提供信息，这些社会关切包括政治极端主义、话语孤立以及人们认为政治沟通中令人愉快的“真相”的下降。

The use of Facebook and Twitter (collectively referred to as "social media" hereafter) for politicaldiscourse, has been argued to directly encourage the partisan polarisation of online communities. Ifverifiable, this development has the potential to redefine public debate in the UK's political arena.To measure this perceived phenomenon, an examination is required of social media's transformativeeffect on the discursive relationship between political actors, news media and the public, which definespolitical issues in the public sphere.Firstly, news and opinion is produced by an ideologically-diverse array of political and news mediasources. Secondly, social media users experience news interactively, and collectively respond to politicalinformation through shared subjective expressions of opinion and emotion. These changes to the waypolitical information is communicated suggest that public opinion on social media is established througha reciprocal dialogue between news producers and a respondent public.However, this implied connection is not cohesively studied in current academic research. The influence of"elite" news sources (the social media profiles of politicians, parties, journalists and news organisations)and public responses to political content (including discursive polarisation) are primarily studiedindependently of one other.To address this absence, this study presents a pioneering methodology to examine how perceptions ofpolitical issues resonate across news sources and public conversation on social media. By holisticallyconsidering the proliferation of partisan opinions in discourse between political, news media and publicactors, it will reveal the extent of political polarisation on a national level. The scope, length and uniquedesign of this project will make a significant academic contribution, addressing a scarcity of UK basedstudies.News articles and social media posts from elite sources, and posts/comments by public users concerningthe three most prominent issues in British politics (defined by opinion polls) will be collected over an 18-month period and analysed for shared political evaluations, i.e. "frames". Frames are understandings of asocietal issue communicated through media discourse. In political terms, they refer to a combination of aperceived problem, its cause and a judgement on the situation.Using software that finds commonly used words and the context in which they appear, identification ofprominent "problems" and "causes" expressed in elite sources will be made into data points ("coded").Text analysis software will be used to measure the positive and negative associations ("sentiment")between these problems and causes. This will statistically indicate an evaluative judgement, completingthe frame. Influential frames across media sources will be found using advanced quantitative methods(e.g. hierarchical cluster analysis).Once the lexical and semantic structure of common political arguments are found using this method,social media posts by public users will then be compared to see which frames are reciprocated and aretherefore resonant in social media conversation.The results will indicate whether partisan polarisation is present and influential on British social media. Ahypothesis will also be assessed: that ideological news production by elite sources, and collective publicresponses united by shared opinion and emotion, will encourage the wider diffusion of partisan4 / 23perspectives. A deeper knowledge of how partisan opinions are spread through social media will findapplication in civil society, informing constructive responses to societal concerns, including politicalextremism, discursive isolation and the perceived decline of agreeable "truth" in political communication.