New Approaches to Studying Hybrid Information Sourcing Practices

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Henri Mütschele, whose focus is on the interplay between traditional and social media in positional polarisation. What are the opinion dynamics in networked publics? This project focusses on positional or ideological polarisation, two concepts which are often used synonymously, and sees polarisation as a process in which positional distances between two entities are growing.

Such polarisation need not be symmetrical between the groups involved, and can be measured along two dimensions: along a left-right political scale and along a GAL-TAN scale that examines the political values of the individuals and groups involved. The thematic focus of the study is on climate and migration issues.

if polarisation is observable on the societal level, then it ought to be observable within organisations as well. Within conservative parties, for instance, the right wing might move further towards the extreme in its views, while moderates move only slightly further in the same direction, increasing divisions between them; similarly, in climate movements, different factions may have diverging opinions about radical forms of protest, leading them to drift apart.

Such patterns may be caused for instance by general mainstream and social media use patterns, or by the affordances of social media platforms: these can be operationalised in experimental studies, too, although this is usually done more for affective than for positional polarisation, and the findings remain ambivalent and unclear. Group identity may be especially important here, and how this works is different for formal political parties and loose social movements.

Henri’s project is studying this through a content analysis of the public-strategic communication of social movements and political parties, a panel survey of supporters, and online diaries that capture the information sources encountered by participants.

The emphasis in the latter is on hybrid sources as a third source type next to mainstream media and personal sources: such hybrid sources are common in social media, where individuals share and comment on mainstream media content and thereby embed them in a personal context. Mainstream and social media combine in such sources, therefore, and source credibility will depend both on the credibility of the mainstream media outlet and the credibility of the social media sharer.

The online diaries will attempt to catch this: participants will be asked to list all the mainstream, social, and hybrid media sources for a specific issue that they encountered on a given day, their personal opinion on the parties and movements mentioned, and their perceptions of the opinions of mainstream media and personal contacts about these sources.

Eventually, this should enable the examination of changes in the positions of parties and movements, and of their supporters, over time, as well as the moderation of these changes through contact with online or offline sources or through the use of these groups’ own or of external media channels. This should be able to show whether individuals adjusted their positions in line with the groups they sympathised with, or drifted apart from them, and thereby further conceptualise the meso-micro link between groups and individuals from an actor-centric perspective, in the context of specific topics.