Polarization and Echo Chambers in #LeydeEutanasia Debate in Twitter
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Abstract
Political dialogue taken to extremes and the positioning of political actors on the margins of the debate is one of the main concerns of citizens in Spain (CIS, 2020). Far from being a phenomenon exclusive to the political class, this distancing is reflected among citizens themselves who, driven by the characteristics of social networks, have developed a special tendency to listen to themselves and avoid connecting with divergent opinions (Sunstein, 2003). The main objective of this study is to analyse the polarization on Twitter around the #LeydeEutanasia debate in Spain. For the analysis of this phenomenon, NodeXL software has been used for data collection and Gephi for its visualization. In addition, an emotional framing table (Menseres, Del Campo & Rueda-Zárate, 2018) has been recreated in order to analyse the Tweets of Spanish political actors and study their content. In this way, the research has demonstrated the presence of two echo chambers or polarized groups around the debate, which are in line with the ideological blocks on the left/right axis, and which are also observed in the language used to expose their position. However, offensive language is not used in the majority of interactions with the ideological adversary. These data reaffirm the results of previous work in this field of study.
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