Partisan selective news exposure and political polarization on twitter networks in Turkey

Download

index.pdf

Date

2018

Author

Gölcük, Seyit

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

249
views

89
downloads

This thesis aims to investigate the degree of partisan selective exposure, political polarization and their statistical association by using a Twitter data derived from Turkish political Twitter networks. Analysis of a sample of 2.790.339 unique users who have a total of 48.316.548 following links to political news outlets and political entities on Twitter reveals that, Turkish Twitter audiences identified with a political party exercise very high levels of partisan selective exposure to like-minded news outlets and very low levels of cross-cutting exposure to politically discrepant outlets. In addition, they are found to be very polarized in terms of disproportionately following pro-party deputies and retweeting accounts that share their own political views. The regression analyses with interaction terms supported the main hypothesis of this study in that, irrespective of the political party that is being favored of, partisanship combined with higher levels of like-minded news exposure is significantly associated with political polarization, whereas more cross-cutting exposure among partisans is related with less polarized attitudes. Moreover, validation of the partisanship and polarization measures strengthens the findings of this study

Subject Keywords

Social media., Political participation., Online social networks., Polarization (Social sciences).

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622147/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27365

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Political Discourse Strategies Used in Twitter during Gezi Park Protests: A Comparison of Two Rival Political Parties in Turkey Yavuz, Nilay; PARLAK, İSMET; Subay, Ozlem Ozdesim (2018-01-01) Along with the growing use of twitter as a tool of political interaction, recently, there has also been an attention in the academia to understand and explain how and why politicians use twitter, and what its impact on the political outcomes are. On the other hand, there has been little analysis about the content of the tweets that politicians from different parties posted during major political events. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the discourse strategies that the top-level politicians of th...
Social media and word-of-mouth dispersion : factors affecting likelihood of diffusion Kursun, Zuhal Sinem; Yılmaz, Cengiz; Department of Business Administration (2013) This study aims to analyse the factors behind electronic word-of-mouth participation on social network sites, especially on Twitter. For this purpose, the general drivers behind such activity is classified, and other sub-factors were categorised under these drivers were categorised as influencers and determinants. Both individual and environmental factors were studied for a comprehensive analysis about factors increasing or decreasing the likelihood of diffusion of word-of-mouth messages. Besides the hypoth...
Social media usage in politics : the framing effect and political involvement Özdemir, Burçin; Yılmaz, Cengiz; Department of Business Administration (2016) This study aims to explore the role of framing effect on the impacts of political messages transmitted through Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Messages from politicians framed differently (positive/negative, use of symbolic language / neutral language) are evaluated by a large number of individuals with varying demographic characteristics and political involvement levels, and the respondents’ degree of (1) agreement, (2) comprehension, (3) persuasion, (4) confidence with the message as well as (5) willingne...
Collective classification of user emotions in twitter İleri, İbrahim; Karagöz, Pınar; Department of Computer Engineering (2015) The recent explosion of social networks has generated a big amount of data including user opinions about varied subjects. For classifying the sentiment of user postings, many text-based techniques have been proposed in the literature. As a continuation of sentiment analysis, there are also studies on the emotion analysis. Because of the fact that many different emotions are needed to be dealt with at this point, the problem becomes much more complicated. In this thesis, a different user-centric approach is ...
A critical appraisal on the societal effects of television magazine programs in Turkey Çakar, Mehmet; Kaya, Ahmet Raşit; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2004) This thesis analyzes the contents of the Turkish magazine programs to explore as if the contents feed anti- establishment feelings or reinforce the existing hegemony in the society. The theses also traces the audience attitudes and beliefs towards the magazine programs in Turkey. The results suggested that programs do not represent any threat to the existing hegemony. On the contrary, it is more plausible to suggest that they represent a serious support to the existing order. The audience reactions revealed...

Citation Formats

S. Gölcük, “Partisan selective news exposure and political polarization on twitter networks in Turkey,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2018.