TikTok jako narzędzie budowania wizerunku politycznego: studium empiryczne oddziaływania przekazów na TikToku na odbiór polskich polityków

Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts. We develop a novel theory that roots these two trends in historical changes in party coalitions. Changing racial compositions of the two major parties led to the formation of racialized images about Democrats and Republicans in people’s minds—and these images now structure Americans’ partisan loyalties and policy preferences. We test this theory in three empirical studies. First, using the American National Election Studies we trace the growing racial gap in party coalitions as well as the increasing overlap between racial and partisan affect. Then, in two original survey studies we directly measure race–party schemas and explore their political consequences. We demonstrate that race–party schemas are linked to partisan affect and issue preferences—with clear implications for the recent developments in U.S. politics.

Introduction: This literature review synthesizes current research on filter bubbles in social media communication, exploring how algorithmic personalization shapes user experiences and informational diversity. Methodology: The review examines theoretical frameworks and empirical studies that identify the mechanisms through which filter bubbles form on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Results: Algorithms, driven by user behaviour and engagement metrics, select content that often reinforces pre-existing beliefs, potentially leading to ideological homogeneity. Evidence is presented regarding the prevalence and impact of these bubbles on public discourse, political polarization, and democratic participation. Discussion: Mitigation strategies are considered, including algorithmic transparency, digital literacy initiatives, and platform design modifications aimed at promoting exposure to diverse perspectives. Both supporting and critical viewpoints of these dynamics are evaluated, highlighting the nuanced role of filter bubbles in digital communication. Conclusions: The study underscores the broader societal implications of filter bubbles and calls for continued interdisciplinary research to develop effective solutions that foster informational diversity and a healthy democratic dialogue in the digital age.

Much qualitative research has drawn an association between social media and domestic terrorism, with the studies reaching different conclusions. However, few empirical studies have evaluated whether the surge in social media participation affects domestic terrorist events. Controlling for common explanations in the literature, we conduct a cross-national, time-series analysis of up to 151 countries from 2000 to 2019 to assess the impact of social media penetration on domestic terrorism. We find that greater social media penetration increases the likelihood of domestic terrorism in countries as it supports extremists’ ability to recruit, mobilize, and train terrorists. Using mediation analysis, we also find that greater social media penetration amplifies online and political polarization, increasing the likelihood of domestic terrorism events. Our work indicates the possible mechanisms linking social media and domestic terrorism and the need to develop and apply appropriate counterterrorism strategies to mitigate terrorist operations.

Understanding the influence of users’ opinions on their search behavior together with their inherent biases in web search has garnered widespread interest in recent times. This is largely due to the implications of promoting critical thinking, explaining phenomena such as political polarization, or the manifestation of echo chambers. It is important to understand how personal opinions can bias users’ interaction with search results. Moreover, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of user search intents, namely non-purposeful browsing versus searching with a pre-defined goal, on users’ interactions with search results. We take a step towards bridging this knowledge gap through an empirical study in this paper. To do so, we select two controversial topics in abortion and gun control, and invite users to learn about them through ‘Purposeless’ and ‘Purposeful’ web searching. Our findings suggest that users with strong personal opinions exhibit biased interactions with the search results. However, the effect of users’ opinions on their interactions with search results can differ depending on whether users search purposelessly or with a purpose. Our findings advance the current understanding of the effect of users’ opinions in web search sessions, and show that users’ search intents shape their interaction with search results. This work has broad design implications on dealing with bias in interactive information retrieval systems.

Many politicians, journalists and scholars suggest that echo chambers and filter bubbles are chiefly responsible for the emergence of communities, particularly online, that espouse contrarian and counterfactual perspectives and ideologies, and for their disconnect from the societal mainstream. Echo chambers are said to enable these groups to reinforce their views by connecting with like-minded others; filter bubbles to shield them from encountering contrary perspectives. They are assumed to result from a combination of individual choice, in selecting the news sources to consult or the social media accounts to follow, and the algorithmic shaping of such choices, as search engines, news portals and social media platforms highlight and recommend some sources over others. Rigorous empirical evidence for the operation of such processes is sorely lacking, however. Building on empirical studies that show no significant evidence of filter bubbles or echo chambers in search or social media, this chapter argues that echo chambers and filter bubbles principally constitute an unfounded moral panic that presents a convenient technological scapegoat for a much more critical, fundamentally human-made problem: growing social and political polarization. The ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ metaphors have seriously distracted us from addressing that problem, and must now be put to rest.

Increasing levels of political animosity worldwide invite speculation about whether polarization extends to all aspects of our daily life. However, empirical study about the relationship between political ideologies and lifestyle choices is limited by a lack of comprehensive data. This research combines survey and Facebook Like data from more than 7,500 respondents to test whether polarization permeates society or if it is more limited to strictly political domains among politically active individuals. This article compares ideological disunity in political and non-political domains in Belgium (a multi-party political system), to the U.S. (a two-party system). The results indicate that, as expected, polarization is present in page categories that are related to politics and news, but it is noticeably lower in Belgium than in the U.S. On the other hand, no evidence is found of polarization in other domains, including sports, food, and music. On the individual level, people who are more politically active are less likely to endorse ideologically diverse pages across categories, and compared to the U.S., fewer individuals in Belgium are being exposed to large amounts of highly polarized content. The evidence, drawn from large-scale digital trace data, adds nuance to the narrative of widespread polarization across lifestyle sectors, and it suggests domains in which cross-cutting preferences are still observed.

To understand why internet users spread fake news online, many studies have focused on individual drivers, such as cognitive skills, media literacy, or demographics. Recent findings have also shown the role of complex socio-political dynamics, highlighting that political polarization and ideologies are closely linked to a propensity to participate in the dissemination of fake news. Most of the existing empirical studies have focused on the US example by exploiting the self-reported or solicited positioning of users on a dichotomous scale opposing liberals with conservatives. Yet, left-right polarization alone is insufficient to study socio-political dynamics when considering non binary and multi-dimensional party systems, in which relevant ideological stances must be characterized in additional dimensions, relating for example to opposition to elites, government, political parties or mainstream media. In this article we leverage ideological embeddings of Twitter networks in France in multi-dimensional opinions spaces, where dimensions stand for attitudes towards different issues, and we trace the positions of users who shared articles that were rated as misinformation by fact-checkers. In multi-dimensional settings, and in contrast with the US, opinion dimensions capturing attitudes towards elites are more predictive of whether a user shares misinformation. Most users sharing misinformation hold salient anti-elite sentiments and, among them, more so those with radical left- and right-leaning stances. Our results reinforce the importance of enriching one-dimensional left-right analyses, showing that other ideological dimensions, such as anti-elite sentiment, are critical when characterizing users who spread fake news. This lends support to emerging accounts of social drivers of misinformation through political polarization, but also stresses the role of the entanglement between fake news, anti-elite polarization, and the role of scientific authorities in public debate.

For the past 35 years, Wilson’s theory of local political culture has influenced many students of policing and has greatly contributed to the erudition of American police practices. Wilson, based on empirical study, found that variation in the structural arrangements of police organizations could be explained by examining the local political culture of the municipalities in which they are located. Police departments in cities with a professional form of government, for example, focused more on law enforcement activities and had a more bureaucratic structure than agencies residing in cities with a traditional form of government which focused more on order maintenance activities and, correspondingly, had a less bureaucratic structure. The purpose of this paper is to test the utility of Wilson’s theory in today’s police organizations. Data collected from a sample of large, municipal police departments were included in the analysis. The findings suggest that the relationship between local political culture and police organizational structure that Wilson identified many years ago has indeed attenuated. The sample of large municipal police agencies, finds no relationship between local political culture, as measured by Wilson, and four dimensions of organizational structure: formalization, vertical differentiation, functional differentiation, and centralization.

Online social media platforms such as Twitter have been found to be misused by extremist groups, including Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who attract and recruit social media users. To prevent their influence from expanding in the online social media platforms, it is required to understand the online behaviors of these extremist group users and their followers, for predicting and identifying potential security threats. We present an empirical study about ISIS followers’ online behaviors on Twitter, proposing to classify their tweets in terms of political and subjectivity polarities. We first develop a supervised classification model for the polarity classification, based on natural language processing and clustering methods. We then develop a statistical analysis of term-polarity correlations, which leads us to successfully observe ISIS followers’ online behaviors, which are in line with the reports of experts.

Impact of Demographic Factors on Relationship of class Formation on Political Orientation and Polarization in Firozabad Tehsil of U.P: An Empirical Study

We present a model of the market for news with rational consumers and profit-maximizing media outlets in which media bias arises endogenously in equilibrium. Our model relaxes assumptions commonly made in the literature that restrict the number of signals a media outlet can communicate to their consumers and the number of news sources accessible by the latter. This leads to novel behavioral implications on the part of the consumers, which, in turn, provides new insights into how media bias depends on the industrial organization of the market for news and the effects of government imposed fairness standards that restrict the degree of bias of individual news sources. Our model is consistent with findings by recent empirical studies that establish relationships between media bias, consumer ideology, and news consumption patterns. It also provides an explanation for documented historical variation in media bias in the U.S. market that is based on changes in the news consumption costs and the intensity of competition. Our policy analysis demonstrates the perverse effects government imposed fairness standards may have when media outlets are profit-maximizing. Specifically, such policies can lead to Pareto inferior outcomes for consumers and can cause some consumers to consume overall more biased bundles of news reports.

This chapter considers the complex relationship between political polarization and democracy. While ideological or issue-based polarization can have both positive and negative consequences for democracy, depending on the political and institutional context, the binary divisions of society into mutually distrustful and hostile camps - pernicious or toxic polarization - can have devastating consequences for democracy. This chapter traces the evolution of the literature in terms of new concepts and measures of polarization, including affective, identity-based, and pernicious types of polarization. It discusses new theorizing and recent empirical studies in the consequences of hyper-polarization for the security of democracy. In particular, the chapter highlights the role of polarization in contemporary challenges such as democratic backsliding and incremental autocratization, populism, and changing citizen attitudes towards democratic norm violations. It concludes with ideas for future research.

Although many studies of clientelism focus exclusively on vote buying, political machines often employ diverse portfolios of strategies. We provide a theoretical framework and formal model to explain how and why machines mix four clientelist strategies during elections: vote buying, turnout buying, abstention buying, and double persuasion. Machines tailor their portfolios to the political preferences and voting costs of the electorate. They also adapt their mix to at least five contextual factors: compulsory voting, ballot secrecy, political salience, machine support, and political polarization. Our analysis yields numerous insights, such as why the introduction of compulsory voting may increase vote buying, and why enhanced ballot secrecy may increase turnout buying and abstention buying. Evidence from various countries is consistent with our predictions and suggests the need for empirical studies to pay closer attention to the ways in which machines combine clientelist strategies.

Philosophers and psychologists have devoted considerable attention to the study of intellectual humility and intellectual arrogance. To this point, theoretical and empirical studies of intellectual humility and arrogance have focused on these traits as possessed by individual reasoners. However, it is natural in some contexts to attribute intellectual humility or intellectual arrogance to collectives. This paper investigates the nature of collective intellectual humility and arrogance and, in particular, how these traits are related to the attitudes of individuals. I discuss three approaches to collective intellectual humility and arrogance. Rather than arguing that one of these approaches is applicable to all instances of collective intellectual humility and arrogance, I argue that there are at least two and perhaps three distinct forms of both collective intellectual humility and arrogance. Recognizing these distinct forms of collective intellectual humility and arrogance, I argue, is crucial to understanding how intellectual humility and arrogance are related to troubling phenomena like political polarization.

Since the Brexit Referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016, the term ‘fake news’ has become a significant source of concern. Recently, the EU Commission and the UK Parliament have condemned the phenomenon as a threat to their democratic processes and values. However, political disinformation is nothing new, and empirical studies suggest that fake news has not decided crucial elections, that most readers do not believe the online fake news stories they read, and that political polarization in Western democracies like the US began to increase long before online fake news existed. The question then is: how exactly does fake news threaten democracies? This paper argues that online fake news threatens democratic processes because it undermines citizens’ epistemic trust in each other. This in turn threatens to undermine the perceived legitimacy of democratic institutions as a whole. While online fake news is a symptom of a much larger issue (how has the Internet affected democracies, and how can we use its positive power while checking its potential harms?), it deserves particular attention given the potential danger it presents for the viability and the legitimacy of the democratic process.