Who is Shaping Your Agenda? Social Network Analysis of Anti-Islam and Anti-immigration Movement Audiences on Czech Facebook
Abstract
This chapter explores the audiences of Czech anti-immigration and anti-Islamic movements' pages on Facebook and analyses them through social network analysis. The public debate on the immigration crisis on Czech Facebook is highly polarized and it is fragmented into different clusters, whose audiences rarely share the same content or overlap.
The chapter uses new quantitative method called Normalized Social Distance that calculates the distance between various social groups based on these groups members' online behaviour. Drawing on empirical evidence, the chapter demonstrates how social network sites create echo chambers and filter bubbles, thus strengthening confirmation bias.
The methods proposed in this chapter could be adopted by a variety of actors to support their research or decisions with empirical evidence.