Social networks foster polarised views: expert
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People are becoming more polarised in their political views regardless of the reality, new media expert Hernando Rojas said in a lecture at the Thai Journalists Association yesterday.
He said that nowadays, people are depending more on their friends to learn about what might be going on in the political front instead of directly consuming news reports from the media, which they tend to believe is biased.
He went on to explain that more people are believing in what is circulated in the social media, which is often used to poke fun at politicians they don’t like instead of trying to understand different viewpoints. This adds to their general hostility to media, which many people insist is biased even though journalistic ethics require newspapers to be neutral.
“The more we see the media as biased, the more we will turn to other institutions to guide our political behaviour,” he said, adding that there is no cure for this.
“As we rely more and more on friends as news sources, we will get more extreme examples of what is happening because our friends will circulate news about the opposition that they think is ridiculous. If the news does not ridicule the opposition, they will probably not do it,” he said.
“Over time we are going to be exposed to more and more extreme examples of reports about the opposition, which will not necessarily make us more polarised in our views but will make us think the rest of the world is more polarised than it really is,” he said.
Rojas, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was speaking as a guest of Burapha University.
In his speech, Rojas also cited a 2006-2012 study in Colombia involving 1,000 respondents, which found no relationship between media consumption and extreme opinions towards controversial issues. In Thailand, Rojas quoted a survey by Asian Foundation in late 2010, which suggested that there were concerns about the political divide becoming more important than the economic, rural/urban or ethnic divides, even though the study only found that 10 per cent of the people identified themselves as yellow, 14 per cent as red, while more 75 per cent said they did not identify strongly with either of the groups.
