Political polarisation in turbulent times: Tracking polarisation trends and partisan news link sharing on Finnish Twitter, 2015-2023

TL;DR

This study investigates political polarisation and partisan news sharing on Finnish Twitter from 2015 to 2023, revealing how ideological groups differ in topic engagement and news dissemination during recent political crises.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based analysis of Finnish Twitter users' ideological clustering and examines the relationship between polarisation, news sharing, sentiment, and virality across multiple political issues.

Findings

Polarisation varies significantly across topics and ideological groups.

News link sharing is more prevalent among certain ideological clusters.

Sentiment and virality influence news dissemination patterns.

Abstract

The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three different ideological groups - the Conservative Right, the Moderate Right, and the Liberal Left - based on their retweeting of tweets referring to the different political parties in Finland. Trends in polarisation of several topics encompassing the most recent political crises - immigration, climate change, COVID-19, and security policy - between these ideological groups is analysed using network methods. To what extent the polarisation of each topic aligns with the polarisation of the other topics is also studied. In addition, the sharing of news links is examined in relation to the ideological groups of the users as well as to the sentiment and the virality of the tweets in which news links are shared.