Networked Partisanship: Using Framing to Measure Polarisation on Social Media

使用Facebook和Twitter（以下统称为“社交媒体”）进行政治讨论，被认为直接鼓励了在线社区的党派两极分化。如果可以证实的话，这一发展有可能重新定义英国政治竞技场中的公共辩论。为了衡量这一感知现象，需要考察社交媒体对政治参与者、新闻媒体和公众之间话语关系的转化作用，这定义了公共领域中的政治问题。首先，新闻和观点是由意识形态多样化的政治和新闻媒体产生的。其次，社交媒体用户交互式地体验新闻，并通过共享意见和情感的主观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回应者之间的相互对话建立起来的。然而，这种隐含的联系在当前的学术研究中并没有得到连贯的研究。“精英”新闻来源（政治家、政党、记者和新闻机构的社交媒体资料）和公众对政治内容的反应（包括话语两极分化）的影响主要是相互独立地研究的。为了解决这一问题，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社交媒体上的新闻来源和公众对话中产生共鸣。通过全面考虑政治，新闻媒体和公共行为者之间的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，解决英国基础研究的稀缺性。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享的政治评估，即“框架”。框架是通过媒体话语传播的对社会问题的理解。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。使用软件，找到常用的单词和它们出现的上下文，在精英资源中，突出的“问题”和“原因”将被识别为数据点（“编码”）。文本分析软件将被用来测量积极和消极的关联（“情绪”）之间的这些问题和原因。这将在统计上表明评估判断，完成框架。将使用先进的定量方法发现跨媒体源的有影响力的帧（例如层次聚类分析）。一旦使用这种方法找到共同政治论点的词汇和语义结构，公众用户的社交媒体帖子将被比较，看看哪些框架是相互的，因此在社交媒体对话中引起共鸣。结果将表明党派两极分化是否存在并对英国有影响。社交媒体还将评估一个假设：精英来源的意识形态新闻制作，以及由共同的意见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。更深入地了解党派意见如何通过社交媒体传播，将有助于民间社会对社会关切作出建设性反应，包括政治极端主义、话语孤立和政治沟通中令人愉快的“真相”的减少。

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.