원문정보
초록
영어
This study explored the presence of digital echo chambers in the realm of partisan media’s news commenting sections in South Korea. Using semi-unsupervised deep learning for text classification, we analyzed the political slant of 215.5K user comments written by 123.5K unique contributors on NAVER News, the country’s most popular news portal. We found that the political slant of the average user comments to be in alignment with the political leaning of the conservative news outlets; however, this was not true of the progressive media. A considerable number of liberal and conservative comment contributors (48% versus 24%) made a crossover from like-minded media to cross-cutting partisan media. The majority of these crossover commenters were “headstrong ideologues” followed by “opponents” and “flip-floppers.” The implications of the present study are discussed in light of the potential for the news commenting sections to be the digital cafés of Public Sphere 2.0 in South Korea.