Networked Partisanship: Using Framing to Measure Polarisation on Social Media

有人认为，使用Facebook和Twitter（以下统称为“社交媒体”）进行政治讨论，直接助长了网络社区的党派分化。如果能得到证实，这种发展有可能重新定义英国政治舞台上的公共辩论。为了衡量这种感知到的现象，需要检查社交媒体对政治行为者、新闻媒体和公众之间话语关系的变革作用，这种关系定义了公共领域的政治问题。首先，新闻和观点是由意识形态多样化的政治和新闻媒体来源产生的。其次，社交媒体用户互动地体验新闻，并通过共同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，社交媒体上的民意是通过新闻生产者和被调查者之间的相互对话建立起来的。然而，这种隐含联系在目前的学术研究中并没有得到集中的研究。“精英”新闻来源（政治家、政党、记者和新闻机构的社交媒体简介）的影响和公众对政治内容（包括话语两极分化）的反应主要是相互独立的研究。为了解决这种缺失，本研究提出了一种开创性的方法来研究对政治问题的看法如何在新闻来源和社交媒体上的公众对话中产生共鸣。通过全面考虑政治、新闻媒体和公共行动者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。这个项目的范围、长度和独特的设计将做出重大的学术贡献，解决英国研究的稀缺问题。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问题（由民意调查定义）的帖子/评论将在18个月的时间内收集并分析共同的政治评估，即：“帧”。框架是对通过媒体话语传播的社会问题的理解。在政治术语中，它们指的是感知到的问题、其原因和对局势的判断的结合。使用能够找到常用单词及其出现的上下文的软件，识别精英来源中表达的突出“问题”和“原因”将被制成数据点（“编码”）。文本分析软件将用于测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个评估判断，完成框架。将使用先进的定量方法(例如：层次聚类分析)。一旦使用这种方法找到常见政治论点的词汇和语义结构，就可以比较公共用户发布的社交媒体帖子，看看哪些框架是相互作用的，从而在社交媒体对话中引起共鸣。结果将表明党派分化是否存在并影响英国社交媒体。还将评估一种假设：精英来源的意识形态新闻生产，以及由共同的观点和情感联合起来的集体公众反应，将鼓励党派观点的更广泛传播。对党派观点如何通过社交媒体传播的深入了解将在公民社会中得到应用，为对社会问题（包括政治极端主义、话语孤立和政治沟通中令人满意的“真相”的感知下降）的建设性回应提供信息。

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.