Conflicting narratives and polarization on social media

Abstract

Narratives are key interpretative devices by which humans make sense of political reality. In this work, we show how the analysis of conflicting narratives, i.e. conflicting interpretive lenses through which political reality is experienced and told, provides insight into the discursive mechanisms of polarization and issue alignment in the public sphere. Building upon previous work that has identified ideologically polarized issues in the German Twittersphere between 2021 and 2023, we analyze the discursive dimension of polarization by extracting textual signals of conflicting narratives from tweets of opposing opinion groups. Focusing on a selection of salient issues and events (the war in Ukraine, Covid, climate change), we show evidence for conflicting narratives along two dimensions: (i) different attributions of actantial roles to the same set of actants (e.g. diverging interpretations of the role of NATO in the war in Ukraine), and (ii) emplotment of different actants for the same event (e.g. Bill Gates in the right-leaning Covid narrative). Furthermore, we provide first evidence for patterns of narrative alignment, a discursive strategy that political actors employ to align opinions across issues. These findings demonstrate the use of narratives as an analytical lens into the discursive mechanisms of polarization.