Аффект или идеология: влияние политической поляризации на восприятие интернет-троллинга

Политическая наука. 2023. № 3. С. 230–251.

Шилина А. Н.

Two types of political polarization – affective and ideological – are in focus of this study. These types of polarization are supposed to influence perception of political internet trolling. The purpose of this study is to identify the role of affective and ideological polarization in perception of trolls who support either government or opposition. We conducted a survey (N = 200) among users of Russian social media VK. During survey we showed our respondents vignettes with examples of troll-inflated conversations. These vignettes were prepared based on indicators of trolling: provocation (aggression), mockery (sarcasm), spam, usage of templates and identification with trolls by other users. The dependent variable is the respondents’ positive answer that the example of conversation is trolling. We also asked several questions to identify respondents’ political views and perceived level of affective polarization. Then we created two independent variables – distance between trolls’ and respondents’ political positions and mean level of perceived affective polarization. We used probit-regression to measure the effect of these independent variables on respondents’ answer. As the result, we observe a statistically significant effect of ideological polarization on the perception of trolling. Hypothesis about the influence of affective polarization on the respondents’ answers was not confirmed. This research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant no. 21-78-00079, https://rscf.ru/projects/21-78-00079/

Keywords: политические коммуникации, политические представления, social media, political views, восприятие информации, социальные медиа в России, аффективная поляризация, affective polarization, selective perception, political communications, internet trolling, интернет-троллинг