FRAGMENTATION OF ONLINE POLITICAL DELIBERATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE POLISH PRESIDENTIAL AIRPLANE CRASH

1. FRAGMENTATION OF ONLINE POLITICAL
DELIBERATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE POLISH
PRESIDENTIAL AIRPLANE CRASH
MIKOŁAJ HNATIUK, DOMINIK BATORSKI
UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW

2. • Major political events tend to change the political
stances of the individuals
• Notion of "Affair" (Dreyfus affair: Luc Boltanski): A
prolonged dispute about kind of events that tend to
divide disputants ideologically
• How does the communication network change
under the influence of an important event - the
"affair"?

4. • Russia is responsible for the main investigation
which raises controversy, due to the complicated
nature of relations between the two countries
• Shortly after the crash, conspiracy theories start to
emerge
• Those theories gained most popularity among the
right-wing, due to the political affiliation of the
deceased president

5. • Survey from Feb'13: 33% people believe that the President's
death could have been an assassination
• A major Polish newspaper („Rzeczpospolita”) reinforced those
beliefs by publishing in 2012 an article stating that traces of
explosives have been found on the airplane wreck

6. • Structure of the debate after the crash: Did the
discussion about the plane crash result in
segregation in communication networks?
• Segregation in media usage: Has the debate
following the crash caused changes in information
sources which people select?

7. • Major polish political blogging site: Salon24.pl
• Over 80 000 posts written between Jan 2010 and Oct 2010
from almost 7 000 blogs
• Over a 1 million comments, with a timestamp
• Extraction of two main datasets
o Longitudinal network of comments (as opposed to
network of links from blogrolls)
o 2-mode network of users and hyperlinks from posts
referring to the external sources of information (outside
of salon24.pl)

8. Hypothesis: Groups of bloggers divided according to
political beliefs became more segregated after the
plane crash
• Group-level colemans index to measure to what extent
groups of bloggers are segregated
• 1: perfect segregation, -1: perfect „integration”
• 10 networks representing 10 months

9. • Manual coding of subset of 225 most active blogs 3
dimensions of political beliefs:
o Economic (interventionism vs free market)
o Moral beliefs (pro-life vs pro-choice etc.)
o Does she/he believe in a conspiracy around the plane crash
We have read about 3000 posts from those blogs

10. Groups divided in
terms of their
approach to the
„Assasination
hypothesis”

11. Groups divided in
terms of their moral
beliefs.
Impact of the crash
seems stronger.
This is surpising,
because we
expected that the
most „separating
issue” would be the
approach to the
„A.H.”

12. Groups divided in
terms of their
economic views
Impact is weak

13.  A group of bloggers that believe in „the
assassination hyp.” did become more segregated
from the „nonbelievers”
 For other groups, the level of segregation remained
stable
 Considering the other two dimensions of political
beliefs, we can conclude that right-wing bloggers did
become more segrageted from other groups
 This right-wing group has created their own space in
the way that Sunstein (2001) described.

14. • General question: Internet as a deliberative platform?
• „Daily Me” (Negroponte, 1995): internet as an ideal "consumer market"
vs "cyber-balkanization" (Cass Sunstein 2001)
• Adamic and Glance (2005): analysis of links between blogs identified
patterns of homophily and segregation. Similar research: Hargittai,
Gallo i Kane (2008) oraz Wallsten (2010)
• Homophily and segregation -> Polarization (Hindman, 2008) (Lawrence,
Sides, & Farrell, 2010)
• Structure of network: power-law distribution of actors reduces
probability to be heard at all (Adamic,Barabási, et al. 2000)
• We analyze the impact of „discursive events” on actual communication
structure and find that homophily increased under that impact.

15. • We analyze the structure of political debate after the Polish
presidential airplane crash in April 2010
• Using data from major Polish political blogging site (salon24.pl) we
ask questions about the dynamics of segregation that appeared
after the crash
• We conclude that segregation increased rapidly after the crash,
however this is true only for the right-wing bloggers and those who
support the „Assassination hyp.”
• Despite that access to information is now more open than ever that
does not necessarily lead to a more inclusive discussion. People
that are free to choose with whom to communicate most frequently
will choose people with opinions similar to their own.

16. ?
mikolaj.hnatiuk@gmail.com
Twitter: mikolajhnatiuk
github.com/mhnatiuk