Does The internet make us more intolerant? A contextual analysis in 33 countries

ABSTRACT

This paper aimed to study the Internet’s impacts on moral intolerance and social intolerance. Taking the perspective of media ecology, this paper viewed the Internet as a context and explored how it affects social context in which intolerance is formed. Using the data from the World Values Survey 2010–2014, this paper carried out multilevel analyses with 48,841 respondents in 33 countries. The results show a couple of antithetical effects. First, intolerance is enhanced by the Internet penetration as a context but is reduced by the individual use of the Internet as a medium. Second, the effects of the Internet penetration are counteracted by the Internet participation, which builds up a robust democracy that functions to buffer the informational impacts of the Internet.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet
• moral intolerance
• social intolerance
• context
• comparative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jia Lu ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, China. His research focuses on new information communication technologies (ICTs) and social change.

Xin Yu ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, China. His research focuses on comparative journalism and political communication.

ORCID

Xin Yu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1962-3884

Notes

1 The data in this study come from three sources – the WVS (individual-level data), the UNDP (the HDI, the Internet penetration, and the Internet participation), and the Freedom House (the Internet freedom and the freedom index). A country or region would be eliminated if it is not simultaneously included in the three sources.

22 countries and regions are eliminated because they are not included in the Net Freedom Index by the Freedom House. They are Algeria, Chile, Cyprus, Ghana, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kuwait, Netherlands, New Zealand, Palestine, Peru, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Yemen. In addition, five countries are eliminated because their individual-level data in the WVS are inadequate for statistical analyses. They are Egypt, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. As a result, 37 countries and regions are removed from a total list of 60 countries.

2 The tradition/secular-rational values index is a ready-made score and included in the original dataset of the WVS. It involves 12 questions. Please refer to Inglehart and Welzel (2005) for the details about how to create it.

3 Nine countries are not included in the first several years’ reports of the Net Freedom Index but included later. They are Armenia, Colombia, Estonia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, South Korea, and Ukraine. For these countries, we used the data in the nearest later years when there are no data corresponding to the years of their surveys.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (grant number 20151080415) and Beijing Social Science Fund (grant number 16JDGLB026).