Selective Exposure and Polarisation in Chinese Social Media

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The project examined this through a representative nationwide survey of some 1,300 participants in China, assessing affective polarisation through a feeling thermometer and pro- and counter-attitudinal content exposure through self-reporting.

The results show that counter-attitudinal selective exposure can exacerbate affective polarisation; pro-attitudinal selective exposure was not significantly related to cross-cutting discussion, but counter-attitudinal exposure was; the relationship to like-minded discussion was the opposite. Like-minded discussion can exacerbate affective polarisation; counter-attitudinal discussion does not, but also only has a very limited depolarising effect. Incidental exposure to dissenting opinions did not tend to mitigate polarisation. The perceived opinion climate also affected such results, though.