Interpretative Polarization across Platforms: How Political Disagreement Develops Over Time on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp

“Articles in this category include research of affordances for a specific field (e.g. O’Leary et al., 2020; Valenzuela et al., 2018) and the analysis of one affordance (or a few) across multiple platforms (e.g. Duffy et al., 2017; Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“…topics, researchers conducted a qualitative analysis using critical discourse analysis (Lindgren, 2018; Pantti et al., 2019; Wahlström et al., 2020), word analysis (Fonseca et al., 2019), or quantitative analysis using manual coding (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Koltsova & Shcherbak, 2015).”

“…of how different platforms enable, as well as constrain, certain forms of political expression—and that involves paying close attention to the interaction between a platform’s affordances, norms, and contents (see also Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Renninger, 2015; StromerGalley et al., 2015).”

“…have their own specific affordances for political expression, such as the relatively public news feed in Facebook (Settle, 2018) and the more private and closed spaces of messaging apps such as WhatsApp (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020), which may influence democratic outcomes in different ways.”

“IM apps also differ from other social media apps in terms of connectivity and expressivity, which will shape political expression differently (Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2020).”

“These 97 topics were subsequently grouped into 12 distinct topic categories, which fell under five thematic domains (following the practice in Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020): plat-form-centered, Musk-centered, politics, cryptocurrency, and mixed/other.”

“Critics argue that filter bubbles can lead to a lack of diversity in information and view-points and exacerbate existing societal divisions and political polarization (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“As a result, the concept of polarization has become even more blurry (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Yarchi et al., 2020).”

“As such, the media or public discourse on a given issue is understood as consisting of multiple layers associated with its different issue attributes or thematic emphases (Jiang et al., 2023; Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Positional polarisation refers to situations in which attitudes towards a public policy issue have grown so “incompatible with each other, such that satisfying one side will inevitably frustrate the other side” (Kligler-Vilenchik, Baden, and Yarchi 2020, 2; see also Lelkes 2016).”

“Kligler-Vilenchik et al. (2020) call this interpretive polarization , the “process wherein different groups in a society contextualize a common topic in starkly different ways” (p. 2).”

“…or forms of polarization—such as ideological, affective, or interpretative polarization (e.g., Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2023; Iyengar et al., 2019; Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020)—the focus is on identifying when these types become forces that undermine the foundations and functions of…”

“An interpretative polarisation scheme (Kligler-Vilenchik, Baden, and Yarchi 2020) has been demonstrated, contextualising the same data and facts in very di ff erent ways in society, due to the great repercussion achieved.”

“This points to what authors call “interpretative polarization”, denoting the situation when different groups view a common topic in radically different ways (Kligler-Vilenchik, Baden, and Yarchi 2020, 1).”

“However, most of existing studies focused on the static distribution of positions, attitudes, or emotions, and ignored the dynamic nature of polarization (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Intra-community disagreements, ideological clashes, or the amplification of extreme viewpoints can contribute to polarization (Kligler-Vilenchil et al., 2020).”

“This is important as social media platforms may have di ff erential impacts regarding various political outcomes (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Rossini et al., 2020).”

“This tendency is consistent with interpretative polarization, which posits that different groups apply different interpretative frames to make sense of an issue (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Most of these works are based on the idea of positional polarization (Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2020; Yarchi et al. 2021), which consists of the assumption of extreme and incompatible preferences around a political issue (Abramowi(cid:309) 2015a, 2015b; DiMaggio et al. 1996).”

“Issues related to identity politics have also been linked to avoidance (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Yarchi et al., 2021), and more controversial topics may hamper discussion (Matthes et al., 2018).”

“Using data from Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook, Kligler-Vilenchik et al. [3] give an account of how political (de)polarisation takes shape, and how social media algorithms can influence the perception of political content.”

“Users’ political actions are often driven by their political ideologies (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020) and the “political nature of technologies” (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020); shared partisanship drives users to form social ties in online environments (Mosleh et al., 2021).”

“Kligler-Vilenchik et al. (2020) investigated the occurrence of interpretive polarisation in israeli politics and the contribution of social media to polarisation on these platforms. interpretive polarisation was present on all these channels, but their intensities and dynamics differed.”

“In a comparative study of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, Kligler-Vilenchik, Baden, and Yarchi (2020) emphasize the different underlying norms and content of these platforms.”

“Variations in platform architecture can facilitate di ff erent types of connectivity and expressivity and thus shape the potential of online communication (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“This divergence could be understood as a mild level of interpretive polarisation (cf. Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020) between these groups of news outlets: the centre mostly interprets the Voice referen-dum as yet another instance in the perennial contest between progressive and conservative…”

“…consequential for understanding the effects of incivility, as its perceptions and effects are contingent on context (Jamieson et al., 2017), and the ways people negotiate political expression and engagement online is platform-dependent (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Waterloo et al., 2018).”

“However, while Twitter is widely used for advocating for policy change, how e ff ective the platform has been in changing opinions around polarizing issues is less clear [14 – 16].”

“…uses, messaging apps are primarily interpersonal communication platforms where people engage with a mix of strong and weak ties (Chadwick, Hall, and Vaccari 2025), which facilitate cross-cutting political conversations among friends and family (Kligler-Vilenchik, Baden, and Yarchi 2020).”

“One especially consequential form of segmentation is ideological segmentation, which may reinforce political polarization (Cinelli et al., 2021; Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Kligler-Vilenchik et al. (2020) document how divergent interpretations of political events on social media create significant gaps in opinion, often leading to confrontation.”

“This emerges from the fact that each online source has its own characteristics, influencing what and how topics are discussed and propagated [71], [72].”

“One way this polarization can occur is when people with varying political beliefs interpret a political incident on social media through very different lenses, offering almost no common ground (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“The case study richly illustrates YouTube’s affordances of expressivity and connectivity (see Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Overall, our findings imply an interpretative polarisation among the online public as to the government’s foreign policy, wherein different groups in a society contextualise the same topic in starkly different ways (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“…opportunities for inter-group dialogue; 22,35–37 interpretive polarization , divergent and often delegitimizing interpretations of political issues; 38 toxic or hostile online expression; 37,39 and, at the extreme, destructive or pernicious polarization , in which opposing groups view one another…”

“A similar form of polarized action is interpretive polarization , which might also be considered as a variant of interactional polarization that targets the communicative contributions of other participants, rather than those participants themselves (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020).”

“Although scholars increasingly study political communication across platforms rather than within isolated silos (Bossetta 2018; Lukito 2020; Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2020), the literature still says little about how the same external stimulus is received across structurally different environments…”

“While some research employed strategies such as machine translation or separate topic models for each language (e.g. Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020; Tresch and Feddersen, 2019), these methods often fail to capture cross-linguistic nuances and can result in fragmented analyses.”

“This mirrors what Kligler-Vilenchik et al. term interpretive polarization (36).”

“Sentiment has indeed been frequently employed as a proxy for disagreement [98, 99], although it often provides an oversimplified representation of argumentative differences.”

“Even before social networking sites became popular, scholars in the early 2000s have warned the public about the dangers of algorithm based social networks [4].”