Political Polarization of Major News Networks on Twitter

America’s political climate has been extremely split leaving little room for compromise in recent months.This has been an increasing issue since the inauguration of former president Trump where he had inadvertently promoted the reemergence and vocalization of racism. But perhaps the most crucial factor behind the move to bipartisanship is the rising prevalence of misinformation circulating online. Misinformation campaigns are becoming the new form of political sabotage, especially since the discussion of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential elections.

Misinformation is an increasingly damaging issue pervading online discussions and social media. With the hyperconnected nature of today’s world, misinformation has the potential to spread like digital wildfires (World Economic Forum 2013). From FaceBook groups to anonymous discussion boards, misinformation and conspiracy theories can originate from anywhere and be brought over to other platforms. Prior to the implementation of more stringent moderation over conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media, limited moderation allowed great propagation of misinformation online. With the rise of cancel culture, people spreading misinformation are getting more flak than before.

It’s not just individuals being called out but also organizations. Due to the Internet being the norm for sharing ideas and views, news outlets have social media accounts in tandem to traditional cable news programs. But due to the traditional notion of news outlets tailoring to a certain political alignment, many have inadvertently propagated misinformation. News outlets, despite internal bias, still remain an important source of aggregating current events in the world and summarizing the headlines for the general public. To cut them some slack, many of the headlines need to be relatively charged in order to get the people’s attention as the business side relies on ratings and general viewership.

Political spectrum of various news sources.

There’s a significant difference in not only influence but also responsibility between news outlets and individuals. As an organization, their social media accounts are often handled by a team of employees rather than a single person and their posts need to appeal to a wider audience. Because of this, while the framing of news can and will be biased, they tend to be self censored to some degree and may not properly reflect the political alignment of the overall organization. A workaround method is to characterize the news outlets based on the posts of their viewer base since there is less reason to preemptively self censor themselves and post about topics more in line with their political beliefs. While not directly being able to position the alignment of the news outlets is less than ideal, the viewer base should reasonably be a good lens into the audience they want to cater to.

With the goal being how to relate the viewer base to their respective news outlet, the question now is how to carry that out. A benefit of looking into Twitter is that posts can be grouped up with other similar or related posts using a hashtag system. By taking advantage of the underlying relationship between posts, the structure in the background linking users of Twitter can be reassembled, similar to other social networks. Using the posts from active users interacting with each news outlet, a set of hashtags can be assembled and associated with each news outlet. With an individualized set of hashtags, each news outlet can be compared and a measurement of how similar they are to each other can be made.

Creating a measurement of similarity between the hashtags in theory should capture the general alignment of the news outlets. This is assuming that news stations that align with a certain political ideology would be more similar to other news stations aligning with the same political ideology. This happens to be the case as the news stations, plotted on a line, fit the expected alignment of the news stations. Additionally, the positioning of the stations fit a grouping comparable to the two major parties, the Democrat and Republican parties. Remember that the political alignment was found through the news stations’ respective viewer base. This relationship between the viewer base and the news station that they subscribe to is not surprising. People tend to enjoy watching and interacting with topics they agree with. But this leads to a sort of confirmation biased view of the world. The fact that the news outlets curate the events they cover in addition to the way it is presented provides room for a strong responsibility on their part to self moderate as to how they impact their viewer base.

Keeping up with events that have happened in the previous months, it’s obvious to see the extreme bipartisanship in America. As the 2020 election carried out, news outlets presented news fitting in line with their political alignment which supported the political division. With the strong alignment between the news outlets and their viewer base, it brings into question the influence and impact news outlets have had over the past few years leading up to the culmination of events and political climate currently at hand. At a simple overview, has the people watching the news pushed the news to conform or rather has the news outlets contributed to the polarized political climate. Regardless, it is important to understand the amount of influence news stations have and hold them accountable to the material they present.

References:

Pew Research Center Political Spectrum: https://www.pewresearch.org/pj_14-10-21_mediapolarization-08-2/
World Economic Forum: http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/risk-case-1/digital-wildfires-in-a-hyperconnected-world/