|
|
ENQUIRE PROJECT DETAILS BY GENERAL PUBLIC |
| Project Details |
| Funding Scheme : | General Research Fund | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Number : | 12609319 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(English) : | The Making and Unmaking of the Public Sphere: Outcomes of Political Disagreement, Expression Avoidance, and a Filtered Information Repertoire | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(Chinese) : | 公共空間的創立與破壞： 來自政治分歧、表達規避、與信息庫篩選的影響 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(English) : | Prof Zhang , Xinzhi | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Department : | Department of Media and Communication | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Institution : | Hong Kong Baptist University | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| E-mail Address : | xzzhang2@cityu.edu.hk | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tel : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Panel : | Humanities, Social Sciences | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject Area : | Humanities and Arts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Exercise Year : | 2019 / 20 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fund Approved : | 445,520 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Status : | Completed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Completion Date : | 31-8-2021 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Objectives : |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract as per original application (English/Chinese): |
This project examines the extent to which social media use contributes to an informed, tolerant, and active citizenship in a media-saturated but politically polarized and fragmenting society. While the “logic of connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg 2012, p. 739) states the political implications of social media, several disconnective actions have emerged when people experience political disagreement, such as cutting off political discussion, masking their political viewpoints, or even terminating relationships (Wells et al., 2017). While digital media technologies enable people to select an information repertoire, i.e., online sources or connections from which they communicate political information (Wolfsfeld, Yarchi, & Samuel-Azran, 2016), they also create echo chambers, where like-minded people are clustering and non-like-minded people are detached. It jeopardizes a cornerstone of societal well-being and the civic culture (Almond & Verba, 1963), undermining the ability of people to communicate with people holding different viewpoints and to be aware of the rationales and arguments of others (Habermas, 1989).
This project will explain how people respond to political disagreement, such as by remaining silent, or by filtering their connections on social media, and how these online behaviors facilitate or undermine political engagement. The project starts from reviewing literature on reactions to political disagreement (Barnidge, 2017; Mutz, 2002), namely, the spiral of silence and political homophily. Then it elaborates two types of politically motivated online behaviors, namely, 1) opinion expression avoidance strategies (Hayes, 2007) and 2) information repertoire filtration (John & Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015). The project will investigate the outcomes of these processes through indicators of an informed, tolerant, and active citizenship: 1) political knowledge, 2) political polarization, and 3) political participation.
The project focuses on Hong Kong, a society with a high digital media penetration rate, which has also witnessed several controversial political events over the last two decades. Using a mixed-methods approach, the project will conduct focus group interviews to understand why and how disagreement-evoked expression avoidance strategies and information repertoire manipulation are taking place. A two-wave panel survey based on representative samples will be implemented before and after a milestone political event, i.e., the 2020 Legislative Council election. It will explore causal relationships between reactions to political disagreement and their consequences. The project aims to understand how digital media nurture a diverse public sphere, with a more open, egalitarian, reasoned, and rational discourse of deliberation (Habermas, 1989). It aims to make conceptual generalizations to other media-saturated and politically polarizing and fragmenting societies. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Realisation of objectives: | The project team reviewed and updated related theories on political disagreement, affective polarization, social media communication, and political participation. Guided by the theoretical frameworks, the project team implemented a population-based two-wave online panel survey and a virtual focus-group interview. The online survey was based on a stratified sample implemented in Hong Kong from 8 July to 22 July 2020 (wave 1, n = 1208) and from 8 September to 22 September 2020 (wave 2, n = 791). Participants were local Hong Kong citizens aged between 18 to 65 years, recruited by Dynata, an online survey firm. The online focus group interview was conducted on 22 – 25 March 2021. We recruited 26 Hong Kong residents aged from 20 to 33 and implemented the discussion on Slack, an encrypted online platform asynchronously and anonymously within the study period. Results from the mixed-methods approach are informative and meaningful to address all five research objectives. Objective 1. To examine the interplay between political disagreement on social media and different dimensions of political engagement in a politically-divided city-state; To address our research objectives, we distinguished two types of political participation to better examine the relationships between political disagreement and political engagement. We termed the actions “activist participation” if the participants need to reach a decision with a fixed political standpoint, such as joining a rally or demonstration, signing a petition, or boycotting a business for political reasons; we termed those actions as “deliberative participation” when a mutual understanding of different political views among participants is important to achieve the desired political goals, and opinion diversity contributes to the continuance of these activities, such as volunteering, contributing to a community project, contacting media to share political views, or attending meetings of a community group. We also focused on people’s information repertoire filtration, such as unfriending, blocking, untagging photos, as well as stopping the receipt of information from disconnected sources, such as unsubscribing from a news forum or opting out of virtual communities. We found that exposure to political disagreement would lead to both types of political participation via the mediation of information repertoire filtration. Our study provides a nuanced understanding of how people use social media to curate their sources and connections in responding to political conflicts in a high-choice and highly politically polarized environment. Objective 2. To elaborate and explain people’s disagreement-evoked communication practices on social media, i.e., adopting opinion expression avoidance strategies and filtering information repertoires. From the survey study, we found that people would conceal their political opinion from withdrawal behaviors, i.e., removing previously published contents, such as (1) deleting or editing the posts; (2) asking people to untag themselves from a post, and (3) untagging themselves from a photo published on social media. The levels of these withdrawal behaviors were moderate (wave 1: M = 2.19, SD = 1.03; wave 2: M = 2.22, SD = 0.98). We also identified the extent to which people filtered their information repertoire, such as (1) hiding or blocking someone’s comments or posts on social media because of his/her political viewpoints; (2) unfriending or unfollowing some friends because of political viewpoints; (3) leaving or opting out from an online group for political reasons; (4) unsubscribing from public social media pages because of their political viewpoints; and (5) reporting someone because of their political viewpoints. The mean values of these items showed that the levels of such behaviors are moderate (wave 1: M = 2.30, SD = 0.95; wave 2: M = 2.31, SD = 0.93). We found that encountering political disagreement is the major predictor of withdrawal behaviors and information repertoire filtration. The focus-group interview revealed more nuanced disagreement-evoked communication practices on social media. We found that most discussants regarded maintaining interpersonal harmony as more important than solving political disagreement, especially for their socially close connections; therefore, they would stop discussing politics to maintain social relations. Discussants were aware of the potentially negative consequences of expressing viewpoints on politically sensitive topics. They adopted several strategies to conceal their viewpoints, such as nonengaging, diverting to other topics, and pretending to agree. Discussants also used sophisticated privacy management tactics on social media to manipulate the visibility of their communicative behaviors. Objective 3. To illuminate whether these disagreement-evoked communication practices influence political knowledge, political polarization, and political participation; We found that disagreement-evoked communication practices would lead to political participation. However, we did not identify a statistically significant effect of political disagreement on political knowledge. In the exploration of political polarization, after reviewing the latest literature, we found that while several studies addressed the antecedents of polarization or its consequences on nonpolitical issues, “little has been written on [the political consequences of affective polarization]” (Iyengar et al., 2019, p. 139). Therefore, we investigated the consequences of affective polarization to fill this research gap. We found that affective polarization plays an important role in Hong Kong people's political life, making the political consequences of disagreement-evoked communication practices vary. We found that the indirect effect of exposure to disagreement on both types of participation via information repertoire filtration was stronger when the affective polarization was low. In other words, the “disagreement --> information repertoire filtration --> political participation” linkage is more salient when people are less polarized. Objective 4. To advance knowledge on the framework of the spiral of silence and political homophily, and to validate and clarify the contradictory findings of the political implications of digital media technologies; The present study advances theoretical frameworks of the spiral of silence, political homophily, affective polarization, and political engagement in the social media setting and in a highly politically polarized context. We found that the (non-)communication affordances of social media would group likely-minded people together to achieve their political goals. Undoubtedly, such a highly personalized online connection makes organizing and mobilizing political activities easier. However, such a homogenous information repertoire might lessen the ability of people to comprehend the other side of an argument and thereby undermine deliberation. Objective 5. To offer a better understanding of the extent to which using social media may or may not lead to an informed, tolerant, and active citizenship in the context of Hong Kong and make conceptual generalizations to other societies in the world, which are media-saturated but politically polarized and fragmenting. Our project has advanced prevailing beliefs and research on the role of social media in supporting deliberation and an active public sphere. It contributes to a nascent research agenda that examines disagreement-evoked (dis-)communication in online settings and the consequent political outcomes. It contributes to research on the connective logic of social media by offering countervailing evidence and debunking a technologically deterministic view of the political potential of social media. When the connectedness of social media grants people the liberty to manage their online connection, it also enables people to opt out of the marketplace of ideas. Polarization may be shaped by user choices rather than merely technical determinants. The current study offers an empirical analysis of how social media may be a double-edged sword in both facilitating or jeopardizing a society's well-being and civic culture. References Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129-146. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Summary of objectives addressed: |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Research Outcome | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Major findings and research outcome: | We conducted a population-based two-wave online panel survey and a virtual focus-group interview. In the survey study, we found that exposure to disagreement would lead to using opinion expression avoidance strategies, such as removing previously published content on social media. Disagreement would also trigger people to filter their information repertoire, such as unfriending others or opting out from online communities. Disagreement leads to political participation via the mediation of information repertoire filtration. That is, exposure to disagreement leads people to filter their information repertoire by disconnecting from those with whom they disagree, and information repertoire filtration could facilitate political engagement. Meanwhile, we found that affective polarization would vary the political consequences of disagreement-evoked communication practices. The indirect effect of disagreement on participation via information repertoire filtration was more substantial when polarization was low. The focus-group interview revealed nuanced disagreement-evoked (non-)communication practices on social media. We found that most discussants regarded maintaining interpersonal harmony as more important than solving political disagreement, especially for their socially close connections; therefore, they would stop discussing politics to maintain social relations. Disagreement would increase political knowledge if meaningful dialogues were conducted afterward. Discussants were aware of the potentially negative consequences of expressing viewpoints on politically sensitive topics. They adopted several strategies to conceal their views, such as nonengaging, diverting to other topics, and pretending to agree. Discussants also used sophisticated privacy management tactics on social media to manipulate the visibility of their communicative behaviors. The above findings are reported in several research outcomes. We presented a paper from the two-wave online panel survey at the 72nd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Paris, France, on the effects of political disagreement on political participation. An updated version of the paper has been published in Social Media + Society, a leading journal in the field (Q1 in SSCI-Communication). Another paper derived from the virtual focus-group interview was presented at the 105th Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Detroit, the US. The manuscript is now under revision and will be resubmitted to Telematics & Informatics, a Q1-ranked SSCI interdisciplinary journal on digital media and society. We have also submitted two papers to two flagship communication journals, investigating people’s responses to political disagreement in a networked public and its social and political implications. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Potential for further development of the research and the proposed course of action: |
1. The current study is based on self-reported data. Future studies may use users' behavioral data, such as their online digital traces, to validate the results obtained from the present study. 2. The current study relies on an opt-in online panel, and those who are younger, with higher educational levels, and have more digital skills are inevitably overrepresented. Future studies may consider using a stricter probability sample to enhance the generalizability. Future studies may also consider focusing on the political engagement of under-represented populations. 3. Future studies may examine the role of social media algorithms, such that whether the algorithm-empowered platforms would capture users' unfriending behaviors and follow their preferences, thereby enlarging political polarization. 4. Political attitudes may spill over into non-political domains such as social relations, economic behaviors, and job recruitment. Future studies should consider whether political disagreement or other political attitudes will lead to actions in non-political fields. 5. Further studies may consider using a cross-polity comparative approach to compare Hong Kong with other societies. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Layman's Summary of Completion Report: | Social media has enabled individuals to actively select their tastes by following or subscribing to specific accounts or joining discussion groups. It may also insulate people's own beliefs from the rebuttal of opposing views by unfriending or blocking others or using social media's privacy settings to manipulate their visibility to different people. When such non-communicative behaviors grant liberty for people to manage their online connection, in the long run, such disconnection would inevitably make people opt out of the marketplace of ideas. We conducted a virtual focus-group interview and a two-wave online survey. We found that disagreement makes people hide their true opinion or unfriend others, and such non-communicative behaviors help people join political activities with those with similar political views. We found that social media makes it easier for people in the political middle-ground to select their political information sources, becoming the victims of social media disconnection. Our project offers a systematic empirical analysis of how social media may be a double-edged sword in both facilitating or jeopardizing deliberative and respectful communication and, thereby, a polity's well-being and civic culture. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Research Output | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peer-reviewed journal publication(s) arising directly from this research project : (* denotes the corresponding author) |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Recognized international conference(s) in which paper(s) related to this research project was/were delivered : |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Other impact (e.g. award of patents or prizes, collaboration with other research institutions, technology transfer, etc.): |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SCREEN ID: SCRRM00542 |