Echoslamming: how incivility interacts with cyberbalkanization on the social media in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Cyberbalkanization has growingly become common on the Internet and can lead to public’s opinion polarization. This study investigates a specific process of cyberbalkanization through which incivility is circulated within online communities. From a dataset of Hong Kong-based Facebook Pages collected during a social movement, a set of politically-organized communities was identified and their connectivity generated a post-sharing network. A random sample of contents shared between and within these communities was then manually classified based on the level of incivility. The targets of offence through the use of uncivil language were also coded. Contents shared within ideologically compatible communities were found to be more likely to be uncivil. The association was significantly more positive in a populistic community, of which members had unique political nature and cultural norms. The targets were usually political opponents and incivility was adopted to petition detractors from within-community discussions. We therefore suggest ‘echoslamming’ is an online phenomenon through which uncivil contents catalyse anger toward political opponents among ideologically congruent information sources and consequently reinforce the audience’s predilection. Such a mechanism can be one underlying explanation for a vicious circle of cyberbalkanization-induced polarization on political opinions.

KEYWORDS:

• Opinion polarization
• social media
• incivility
• cyberbalkanization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Chung-hong Chan is a research associate at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung. His research interests are cyberbalkanization, polarization, platform interventions, text mining, social network analysis and meta-analysis/metaregression.

Dr. Cassius Siu-lun Chow is a postdoctoral fellow at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, the University of Hong Kong. He was a research associate and manager of the Centre for Social Policy Studies in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and completed series of policy research studies for NGOs and the HKSAR government. His main interest lies in social class and social stratification, and specialized in quantitative research methods in Sociology.

Dr. King-wa Fu is Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests cover political participation and media use, computational media studies, health and the media, and younger generation’s Internet use.

ORCID

Chung-hong Chan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6232-7530

King-wa Fu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8157-5276

Notes

1. Freedom house classify Hong Kong as ‘partly free’ and China as ‘not free’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Public Policy Research Funding Scheme of the Central Policy Unit of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region [grant number 2013.A8.009.14A]; University of Hong Kong [HKU SPACE Postgraduate Fund].