Digital Frontlines: Social Media Engendered Polarization During Geopolitical Crises

Abstract

The international landscape has become increasingly volatile, marked by a growing number of military conflicts and geopolitical confrontations. Social media platforms play a crucial role in managing and shaping such episodes of crisis because content shared through these platforms drive user engagement. Despite the growing interest in investigating the relationship between social media and polarization, existing research presents contradictory findings across different socio-cultural and empirical contexts. This inconsistency highlights the need for investigating whether user engagement on geopolitical war or conflict related social media content contributes to increasing or decreasing polarization. In this paper, we examine the user generated content on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas carnage. Employing network-based opinion dynamics we explore how exposure to video content in social media evolves. The results reveal that polarization steadily grows with the maturity of the discussions as the consensus emerges after numerous rounds of interaction among users. The study has implications on crisis governance and digital literacy efforts that aim at reducing platform driven fracture during geopolitical conflicts.