Political polarisation in turbulent times: Tracking polarisation trends and partisan news link sharing on Finnish Twitter, 2015-2023

Abstract

The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three different ideological groups - the Conservative Right, the Moderate Right, and the Liberal Left - based on their retweeting of tweets referring to the different political parties in Finland. Trends in polarisation of several topics encompassing the most recent political crises - immigration, climate change, COVID-19, and security policy - between these ideological groups is analysed using network methods. To what extent the polarisation of each topic aligns with the polarisation of the other topics is also studied. In addition, the sharing of news links is examined in relation to the ideological groups of the users as well as to the sentiment and the virality of the tweets in which news links are shared.