Social media and political polarisation

Tribal Media: Towards an Enhanced Understanding of the New Norms of Youth Political Engagement through Social Media Echo Chambers
In recent years there have been growing concerns regarding the impacts of social media on democratic norms, increasing societal partisanship, and young adults' (dis)engagement in public debate (McKay & Tenove, 2020; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Boulianne & Theocharis, 2020). As Terren & Borge (2021) note, some scholars have argued that the increasing salience of virtual spaces in political engagement would produce a new independent public sphere and expand exposure to political divergence. However, others are increasingly warning that social media is leading to polarization and the closing of social worlds through the construction of echo chambers (Baumann et al., 2020; Barberá, 2020). It is frequently claimed that social media echo chambers are distorting the views of people through manipulating the human tendency to herd together with agreeable and like-minded people (Chen, 2021). However, these assertions have yet to be fully developed in the context of young adults (Csutak, 2022; Church, 2022), providing scope for further engagement on the significance social media echo chambers have in the formation of new norms of political engagement.
The present project proposal returns this call by employing the concept of 'tribalism' as a lens to better understand the perpetuation of, and norms created by, social media echo chambers. Tribalism has been theorized in many different research agendas in the fields of political science, political culture and identity politics over the past few decades, leading to the term becoming one of the most significant critical concepts in explaining how partisan political identities are formed, disseminated and lived in contemporary democracies (Iyengar et al., 2019). The most enduring interpretation of tribalism in this literature understands it as a partisan and deeply entrenched bias favouring in-groups over out-groups, where affective bonds often transcend constructive interpersonal discussion (Ignatieff, 2013; Shilaho, 2017; Whitt et al., 2021). As Chua (2018) notes, people everywhere are increasingly becoming divided into tribes and engaging with politics through their tribal biases. Indeed, studies on identity politics and the salience of these tribes are emerging as one of the core research agendas for future study in Political Science (Whitt et al., 2021). In this project, I propose the use of the novel framework of 'tribal media' to capture and discuss the tribalism inherent in the circumstances of reception of social media discourse among young adults. As such, I have identified two prevailing perspectives in the current literature on echo chambers where a tribal approach can provide value:
- First, an echo chamber is often characterised narrowly as a situation or phenomenon in which online actors mostly communicate with - and are exposed to - like-minded others (Terren & Borge, 2021). In this sense, echo chambers can nurture an image of politics to such actors as an arena of group interest that consolidates 'symbiotic' in-group unity (Rudden, 2021: 378). While this notion of homophily holds partially true in the tribalism literature, tribal politics are often oriented more on the affective targeting of, and lure towards conflict with, out-group others rather than just the pursuit of homogenous group networks (North et al., 2020). As such, I propose that adopting a tribal lens here can open an enquiry into how social media echo chambers are not solely defined by selective exposure to self-affirming opinions and beliefs, but also rely on a politics of enmity where political engagement can lead to open antagonism against dissimilar others. We have seen this, for example, in the 'Alt-Right' meta-political movement in the US. People who self-identify within this term have been argued to not only seek enc