Polarization, Partisanship and Hyperpartisan Media
The shape of a research programme
The papers gathered here trace an arc from early, optimistic measurement of cross-cutting exposure on social platforms to a more sober account of how partisan attention is structured, weaponised, and institutionalised across hybrid media systems. Bakshy2015-rn anchors the older frame: friend networks are homophilous but porous, and individual choice — not the algorithm — does most of the work of suppressing cross-cutting news. A decade later, the field has largely abandoned the question “do echo chambers exist?” for the messier question of how partisan information environments are constituted, sustained, and reshaped by platforms, parties, and protest movements. Hartmann2025-px’s systematic review makes this drift explicit, arguing that much of the apparent disagreement in the literature is an artefact of inconsistent conceptualisation and operationalisation, while van-Eck2026-xg shows that scholars’ depolarisation prescriptions are largely uncoupled from their own evidence, resting instead on implicit deliberative-democratic ideals.
Measuring partisan attention beyond the domain
A central methodological strand pushes against the source-level measurement that dominated the 2010s. Green2025-ap shows that “moderate” domain-level audience scores routinely mask sharply divergent story-level audiences — networked curation unbundles stories from outlets and re-bundles them into partisan “curation bubbles.” Gaisbauer2025-by makes a complementary case for a multi-level political cartography spanning story, outlet, and content. Mosleh2024-op widens the lens cross-platform, showing that engagement with partisan and low-quality news diverges substantially across seven platforms — a corrective to a field built largely on Twitter and Facebook. Dehghan2026-sy extends that critique to Reddit, where even URL-level overlaps collapse far below domain-level overlaps, and where r/politics fails as a putative cross-ideological town square. Together these papers reframe partisan attention as something that must be measured at the level of stories, frames and curation practices, not just outlets.
Hyperpartisan media as infrastructure, not just content
Several papers reconceptualise hyperpartisan media as organisational and infrastructural, not merely textual. Knupfer2025-vt’s “logic of connective faction” shows how Republican adopters of the CRT issue are more ideologically extreme, more densely tied to right-wing digital networks, and rewarded with greater engagement — hyperpartisan outlets functioning as quasi-organisational “digital surrogates.” Bennett2025-xs generalises this into a broader framework in which platform-enabled “digital surrogate organisations” pull conservative parties toward illiberalism, integrating technocentric and institutionalist accounts of backsliding. Copland2025-em supplies a transnational case: Sky News Australia operates a two-pronged Facebook/YouTube strategy that plugs an Australian cable channel into the US right-wing propaganda pipeline. Rothut2026-or’s protest-facilitated mainstreaming traces an analogous dynamic from below, showing how Querdenken’s Telegram infrastructure routed attention from heterogeneous protest publics into far-right and conspiracist milieus through shared anti-elite framing rather than explicit ideology.
Asymmetries: who shares, who is sanctioned, who is amplified
A consistent — if uncomfortable — empirical finding is partisan asymmetry in misinformation behaviour and platform treatment. Renault2025-uh shows Republicans are flagged on X’s Community Notes 2.3 times more often than Democrats even under a bridging algorithm explicitly designed to neutralise fact-checker bias. Tai2026-qk adds an elite-level dimension, conditioning officials’ misinformation sharing on institutional and ideological position. On the amplification side, Efstratiou2025-gs audits Musk-era Twitter and finds that the apparent right-leaning bias of the “For You” feed is largely explained by agitating content, Musk-proximity, and verification status — pointing to perverse engagement incentives rather than a simple partisan tilt. Ventura2026-yc’s study of Brazil’s X ban shows that even nominally neutral platform interventions produce durable partisan “sorting ratchets”: conservatives circumvented, liberals went silent, and the news environment shifted rightward even after the ban lifted.
Polarisation as narrative, frame and emotion
A more interpretive cluster reframes polarisation as something happening between narratives rather than only between people or networks. Elfes2026-jb operationalises Greimas’s actantial model via an LLM to show that YouTube videos on Israel-Palestine are sharply narratively polarised even where comments superficially converge, with persistent partisan “motifs” beneath. Yoo2026-ev traces how “fake news” itself has been hollowed into a weaponised label by both left- and right-leaning hyperpartisan outlets, redrawing Hallin’s spheres of legitimate debate. Rodarte2026-dk shows Brazilian parliamentarians contesting epistemic authority during the Manaus crisis through three distinct strategies — derivative reporting, direct state-aligned authority claims, and proximity-based brokerage. Starbird2025-jj offers an evidence-frame framework in which misleading election rumours arise less from false facts than from partisan frames operating on (often accurate) evidence, with influencers strategically leaving frames implicit for audiences to fill in. Kalsnes2025-zb adds the affective dimension: Scandinavian populists are particularly adept at converting “Angry” reactions into shares, while “Love” reactions depress sharing. Sarmiento2025-as supplies unsupervised tooling for surfacing such emergent frames at scale.
Consequences, interventions and normative reckoning
A final strand turns to consequences and to what, if anything, platforms and scholars should do. Rossini2026-jn’s three-wave Brazilian panel links belief in electoral misinformation to declining political tolerance, with messaging-app news use operating through misinformation belief — a sharper outcome than the diffuse “polarisation” of earlier work. Simeone2025-vo documents the network ripple effects of targeted deplatforming: removing eight accounts collapsed the hub/authority structure of the Arizona Election Review cluster and shifted discourse from mobilisation to abstract defiance, suggesting that visibility reduction may be a weaker lever than the targeted bans now out of favour. Esau2025-tf argues normatively for deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as antidotes to “destructive polarisation,” while Kristensen2025-ni asks whether alternative platforms themselves drive discursive polarisation. Read alongside van-Eck2026-xg’s indictment of evidence-light depolarisation prescriptions, these papers expose a tension at the centre of the topic: the field can now measure partisan attention and hyperpartisan ecosystems with considerable precision, but its prescriptions remain anchored in normative ideals — deliberative democracy, connective democracy, cross-cutting exposure — whose empirical warrant is, by the field’s own reckoning, mixed.