Abstract
Social media discourses on societal issues such as climate change are increasingly polarized. Discourse polarization is particularly important in phenomena such as political elections. Scholars from IS and related disciplines have examined how technical features of social media such as algorithmic filtering and social factors such as the cognitive bias of social media users facilitate discourse polarization. However, the interaction between technical and social factors has been overlooked. This motivates us to analyze polarization in social media from a socio-technical perspective, by analyzing the social and technical factors salient to discourse polarization in social media and explaining how their interaction can contribute to such polarization. To do so, we reviewed sixty-six studies between 2002 and 2022 from eight digital databases, following the procedures of Templier and Paré (2015). Our preliminary findings identify three kinds of interaction between social and technical components. Our study contributes to the understanding of discourse polarization in social media from the socio-technical interaction and provides a knowledge base for developing design and policy interventions vis-à-vis such polarization.
Recommended Citation
Liang, Weimin; Lei, Zhanfei; and Tarafdar, Monideepa, "Discourse Polarization on Social Media: A Sociotechnical Perspective" (2024). AMCIS 2024 TREOs. 38.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_amcis2024/38