departmental bulletin paper

Departmental Bulletin Paper

Text

Osaka Human Sciences. 2020, 6, p. 1-17

Exposure to online news and polarization of xenophobic attitudes : A quantitative analysis of survey data in Japan and the U.S.

Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

English

Text

2020-03

Many scholars and journalists have raised the possibility that the Internet expands the divide in public opinion and society by polarizing people’s opinions about political issues. Selective exposure to news and civic information is more likely to occur on the Internet than in the mass-media-centered environment of the past.This study focused on cyber-racism, such as the “Alt-Right” in the U.S. and “Nettouyoku”in Japan. We examined the relations between the polarization of xenophobic attitudes and the frequency of exposure to online news on PCs/smartphones. We used data from online questionnaire surveys conducted in the U.S. and Japan in 2016. The results of quantile regression analyses showed that in Japan exposure to online news via PCs signifi cantly expanded the polarization of users’ attitudes, whereas in the U.S. it shifted the attitudes uniformly toward an anti-xenophobic direction. These findings suggest that social, political, and cultural contexts infl uence the occurrence of opinion polarization on the Internet.

10.18910/73797

73797

Exposure to online news and polarization of xenophobic attitudes : A quantitative analysis of survey data in Japan and the U.S.

Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

English

2020-03

Osaka Human Sciences

6

1

17

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/73797

10.18910/73797

https://doi.org/10.18910/73797