Religiously Polarised Message Diffusion on Social Media
Abstract
The study intends to examine the relationship between religious polarisation and message diffusion on social media. Communal and religious messages are shared heavily on social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter (Purnell & Horwitz, 2021). The diffusion of such messages translates into real-life crises many times. The study aims to collect and use the tweets collected using a Twitter API to examine the relationship. We plan to encode the religious polarity of messages manually as religious polarisation is a complex subject. The study uses the diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers, 1962) to understand the diffusion of religiously polarised messages on Twitter. In the study, we propose to test if religious polarisation diffuses more than non-polarised tweets and whether negatively polarised tweets disseminate more than positively polarised tweets. The proposed hypotheses will be tested using Twitter data which will collected usingTwitter API about a religious congregation. The paper aims to contribute to understanding the diffusion of religiously polarised messages on social media and hence to policymakers and governing bodies to mediate the spread of hatred and communal messages on social media.