Undercurrents of echo chambers and flame wars: party political correlates of social media behavior

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine how political party preference and politically active social media use associate with social media behaviors – namely, conformist, provocative, and protective – in the context of the current political sphere in Finland. In our empirical analysis, we use a nationally representative dataset collected from 3,724 Finnish citizens in 2018. Our research confirms the assumption that there are notable differences in the social media behaviors of the supporters of different political parties. Additionally, our research shows that politically active social media use increases the occurrence for all three aforementioned behaviors. The study’s results also confirm that major differences in online behavior exist among the new identity parties’ supporters, who rely heavily on post-materialist and neoconservative political values.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• online participation
• political party preference
• selective exposure
• echo chambers
• political polarization

Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Grant for Political Bubble and Media -project).

Disclosure statement

We confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.

Notes

1. However, to say that party preference interacts with politically active social media use when assessing communicational behaviors is not to suggest a causal relation between the variables; rather it describes the differences between different party supporter groups when evaluating intensity and direction (negative/positive) of the relation of politically active social media use and utilization of behaviors.

2. The political cleavage between post-materialist and opposing neoconservative values has also been described with other theoretical concepts. For example, the cleavage based on post-materialist values has also been described with the so-called GAL-TAN scale, which is an acronym of the phrases green-alternative-libertarian and traditional-authoritarian-nationalist (Hooghe, Marks, & Wilson, 2002).

3. The final structure of the variables was based on the same factor solution employed by Malinen et al. (2018), but we excluded the item “I hesitate to share content on social media that I feel could lead to disputes” because it loaded on both the conformist and the provocative components.

4. This was the original question asked: “How often do you participate in the following activities?” The respondents had to provide their answers regarding four categories of online activity on a 5-point scale, where 1 meant “never,” 2 meant “less frequently than weekly,” 3 meant “weekly,” 4 meant “daily,” and 5 meant “several hours per day.” The categories of online activity were as follows: 1) follow political and societal discussions on social media, 2) produce or create political or societal content on social media, 3) share political or societal content made by others on social media, and 4) participate in political and societal discussions on social media. With aid of principal factor analysis (PFA), we tested the extent to which the variables are related with each other. PFA results indicate that the latter three variables have high-level of interdependence (factor loadings: 0.756, 0.779, and 0.811), while the first one does not have that clear loading to the factor (0.574). Additionally, as the first variable is measuring whether respondent is following discussion, the latter variables are conditionally related to the first. However, for sake of clarity we present the connections of the individual components to social media behaviors in Table A1.

5. The respondents could choose what they considered the most important party from the list, which consisted of 1) the CPF, 2) the FP, 3) the NCP, 4) the SDP, 5) the GL, 6) the LA, 7) the Swedish People’s Party (SPP), 8) the Christian Democrats (CD), 9) the Blue Reform (BR), 10) another party, and 11) none. Due to a lack of cases, the respondents who chose 7, 8, 9, or 10 were combined into the same group (Other).

6. The original question and answer categories were the same as those for politically active social media use. The categories were as follows: 1) read blogs, 2) comment on blog posts, 3) spend time on discussion forums, 4) comment on discussion forums, 5) spend time on social networking sites, 6) participate in discussions on social networking sites, 7) use instant messaging applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), 8) comment on news articles on online news sites, and 9) read other users’ comments on online news sites.

7. The analyses were performed with STATA 16. We utilized the user-written coefplot package to illustrate the interaction effects in the Figure 1 (Jann, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Helsingin Sanomain Saatio [Poliittiset kuplat ja media].

Notes on contributors

Ilkka Koiranen

Dr Ilkka Koiranen (M. Soc. Sci) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Economic Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. His research has especially focused on political participation and formation political networks on social media platforms.

Aki Koivula

Dr Aki Koivula(Dr. Soc. Sci.) is a university lecturer and docent of Economic Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. Research interests include social and political identity, social networks, use of information and communication technologies, and survey methodology.

Sanna Malinen

Dr Sanna Malinen(Ph.D.) is a postdoctoral researcher in Economic Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. She has studied online communities for over a decade, focusing particularly on users’ collective information production and their dynamic roles as information providers and consumers. Her ongoing postdoctoral project examines power dynamics between gatekeepers and the gated in online public spheres.

Teo Keipi

Dr Teo Keipi (Dr.Soc.Sci) is a Senior Researcher at Aalto University, Finland. His research has focused on identity group dynamics, social media networks and bubbles, and links between political ideology and trust.