On Narrative: The Rhetorical Mechanisms of Online Polarisation

2026-01-12

AI Summary

This study investigates how polarized groups construct opposing realities through narrative and whether such narratives can diffuse across group boundaries under conditions of limited interaction. Drawing on structural narrative theory and leveraging large language models alongside natural language processing techniques, the research analyzes 212 YouTube videos and 90,029 associated comments to formally operationalize the concept of “narrative polarization” and quantitatively map the narrative roles of key actors in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Findings reveal that video content exhibits highly polarized narratives. While comment discourse shows surface-level convergence, underlying narrative motivations remain sharply divergent, exposing a mechanism wherein superficial consensus coexists with deep-seated opposition.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Computer Vision: Video Understanding & Activity Analysis

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between narratives, shaping opinions and partisan identities. Yet, how polarised groups collectively construct and negotiate opposing interpretations of reality, and whether narratives move between groups despite limited interactions, remains unexplored. To address this gap, we formalise the concept of narrative polarisation and demonstrate its measurement in 212 YouTube videos and 90,029 comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on structural narrative theory and implemented through a large language model, we extract the narrative roles assigned to central actors in two partisan information environments. We find that while videos produce highly polarised narratives, comments significantly reduce narrative polarisation, harmonising discourse on the surface level. However, on a deeper narrative level, recurring narrative motifs reveal additional differences between partisan groups.

Problem

• narrative polarisation
• partisan narratives
• online polarisation
• collective interpretation
• narrative transfer

Innovation

• narrative polarisation
• structural narrative theory
• large language model
• partisan discourse
• online polarization