González-Bailón Sandra, d'Andrea Valeria, Freelon Deen, De Domenico Manlio
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Complex Multilayer Networks Lab, Center for Digital Society, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento 38123, Italy.
PNAS Nexus. 2022 Jul 29;1(3):pgac137. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac137. eCollection 2022 Jul.
We analyze social media activity during one of the largest protest mobilizations in US history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. Using an unprecedented combination of four datasets (tracking offline protests, social media activity, web browsing, and the reliability of news sources), we show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared on social media, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. These results support the "amplification of the right" thesis, which points to the structural conditions (social and technological) that lead to higher visibility of content with a partisan bent towards the right. Our findings provide evidence that right-leaning sources gain more visibility on social media and reveal that ideological asymmetries manifest themselves even in the context of movements with progressive goals.
我们分析了美国历史上规模最大的抗议活动之一期间的社交媒体活动,以研究新闻内容发布中的意识形态不对称性。通过使用四个数据集(跟踪线下抗议活动、社交媒体活动、网络浏览以及新闻来源的可靠性)的前所未有的组合,我们发现没有证据表明不可靠的来源在抗议期间有任何显著的可见度,但我们确实发现了社交媒体上分享的来源在意识形态倾向方面的不对称性,明显偏向于右倾领域。这些结果支持了“右翼放大”论点,该论点指出了导致具有右倾党派倾向的内容获得更高可见度的结构条件(社会和技术条件)。我们的研究结果提供了证据,表明右倾来源在社交媒体上获得了更高的可见度,并揭示出即使在具有进步目标的运动背景下,意识形态不对称性也会显现出来。