Heating up the debate? Measuring fragmentation and polarisation in a German climate change hyperlink network

Häussler, Thomas (2018). Heating up the debate? Measuring fragmentation and polarisation in a German climate change hyperlink network. Social networks, 54, pp. 303-313. Elsevier 10.1016/j.socnet.2017.10.002

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Research into polarisation on the internet has so far primarily focused on contentious issues and yielded contradictory results. Shifting the focus to a non-contentious setting, this article combines community detection with brokerage analysis and exponential random graph models to assess the degree of polarisation at different levels of a German hyperlink network on climate change. Although homophily accounts for a moderate degree of polarisation at the top level of the network, the communities reveal that other factors prove more decisive in shaping its structure and the article thus contributes to a more refined understanding of the nature of online polarisation.

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