The Impact of Chinese Social Media Platforms’ Affordances on Polarisation

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

Polarisation mechanisms include inclusiveness (involving all affected individuals), justification (through sufficient arguments and reasoning), and responsiveness (exposure to heterogeneous viewpoints), while platform affordances like entry barriers, content capacity, social networks, and interactional feedback in turn affect the presence and impact of such mechanisms.

The project examined this for social network Weibo, instant messaging platform WeChat, and Q&A site Zhihu – platforms whose design emphasises various diverging affordances. Discussion case studies covered controversial discussions about bushfires in Australia, as well as cyberbullying, employee rights struggles, class divisions, and gender roles in China. Polarisation, justification, and responsiveness were assessed from post texts; inclusivity through the number of participants.

Polarisation patterns were different across these events and platforms, and also developed differently over time. Weibo tended to polarise; the other platforms to depolarise over time; polarisation was greater on Zhihu than on Weibo than on WeChat, though. More participants resulted in less polarisation; asymmetrically left-leaning posts increased polarisation; larger post sizes decreased polarisation; and a backfire effect from greater opinion diversity was significant only on Weibo.

The impact on polarisation from social media platform affordances is therefore complex and multifaceted; deliberative affordances must be studied further to better understand their impact on polarising tendencies; and especially in Chinese contexts polarisation appears to be asymmetrical.