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This study proposes a moderated mediation model to understand how social media use influences political polarization through two competing mechanisms and how such mechanisms are conditioned by political tolerance. The model was tested with a survey of 1,200 Hong Kong residents after the prolonged Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. We found that social media use was positively correlated with attitudinal and affective polarization. Such polarizing effects were channeled through politically motivated selective avoidance, but there were noticeable depolarizing effects induced by increased network heterogeneity. More importantly, political tolerance could further amplify the depolarizing effects of social media use. In contrast, political tolerance cannot counteract the polarizing effect of social media use channeled through selective avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How political violence emerges, why people support it, and how authorities can address it without escalating further radicalization remain an ongoing debate. In this study, we develop a quantitative model to predict violence endorsement as a function of repression severity, group identification, and individual emotions. We situate our investigation in the context of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong, during which the public acceptance of violence increased substantially, contrasting the city's long history of peaceful protests. Results show that violence endorsement is associated with repression severity in a U-shaped fashion. While limited repression deters violence endorsement, excessive repression crossing a proportionality threshold escalates it. Group identification is a salient moderator that amplifies the backfire effects of repression. People who are more attached to protesting groups are more vigilant about repression and more supportive of protest violence. Furthermore, we also find that individual emotions exert more significant influences than repression and group identification. Anger, disgust, and fear can result in radicalized opinions. These findings unpack the complex and multifaceted communicative processes that shape the perceptions of protest violence. In contrast to the rational, organizational, and structural models of social movements, we argue that this analytical framework can offer more insights into protest dynamics amid the increasingly personalized political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Hong Kong is riven by serious political and social polarization. Hong Kong's problem does not lie in ideological differences among citizens; rather, the major issue is that people of different political stripes view each other as enemies. In this study, we conducted two experiments to compare the impacts of deliberation and discussion on political depolarization. In study 1, we invited participants of opposing views toward the Article 23 legislation and conducted a 90-min discussion session. The participants were divided into two groups: deliberation and causal discussion. The deliberation group received an information booklet on the issue and had to strictly follow rules of deliberation whereas the causal discussion group had no such stimuli. In study 2, we used video recordings from study 1 and presented the videos to two groups of participants. One group of participants watched the deliberation video and the other group watched the causal discussion video. The main finding of the study is both deliberation and causal discussion had mixed effects on reducing political polarization. After discussion, issue attitude and issue polarization remained largely the same, but people's attitude toward others with opposing views became more favorable and affective polarization was reduced. No systematic differences were found between deliberation and discussion. And watching discussion and deliberation will deliver similar effects but to a lesser extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government response to public opinion is essential to democratic theory and practice. However, previous research on the relationship between public opinion and government attention predominantly focuses on western societies. Little is known about such relationship in nonwestern or nondemocratic societies. Drawing upon time-series data of public opinion polls and government press releases, this study examines the dynamic relationships between public opinion and government attention in posthandover Hong Kong. The findings reveal that the responsiveness of the Hong Kong government to public opinion varies across issue domains and is constrained by the political power from the central government in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion polarization has recently become a prominent social problem in many societies, but whether negative media tone is a possible culprit for opinion polarization remains unclear. Using opinion-polling data on approval ratings of Chief Executive from the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong, we examined the longitudinal relationship between media tone and opinion polarization in Hong Kong. Opinion polarization is conceptualized as the dispersion and the bimodality of opinion distribution, and is operationalized by opinion distribution variance, kurtosis and a composite score. Positive and negative media tones are coded using computerized text analysis programs. Time series analysis suggests that negative news media tone Granger causes opinion polarization but the reverse causal relationship does not hold. In addition, positive news media tone is not related to opinion polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the phenomenon of politically motivated selective avoidance on Facebook in the context of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement protests in 2014. We conceptualize selective avoidance as individual choices that users make to shield themselves from undesirable dissonant views by removing unwanted information and breaking social ties that transmit such information. Given the political turmoil and high level of polarization during the protests, we argue that selective avoidance was related to the socio-psychological factor of perceived out-group threat. We present an analysis of a survey of 769 students from Hong Kong conducted at the height of the street protests. We find that 15.6% of the respondents removed content and/or unfriended a Facebook friend during the protests. The use of Facebook for protest-related information and expression was associated with higher likelihood of selective avoidance, which in turn predicted actual participation in the street protests. The level of perceived out-group threat strengthened the positive relationship between Facebook use and selective avoidance. We thus argue that group conflict in a time of political turmoil may catalyze selective avoidance, transforming a heterogeneous socio-informational environment into a more insulated gated community. Such acts may promote protest participation but also lead to a more fragmented and polarized citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• This study examines the effects of two digital media use over protest participation. • The indirect effects through two socio-psychological variables were tested. • This study was contextualized in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. During the recent wave of pro-democracy movement across the world, new media technologies play a vital role in mobilizing participants. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of social media in empowering grassroots movements, but the rise of alternative media was somehow ignored. This study examines the impacts of social media and alternative media on social movement participation. The data came from a survey of 769 students from eight public universities in Hong Kong at the height of the Umbrella Movement. The findings revealed that acquisition of political information from social media and alternative media is associated with social movement participation through different mechanisms. Specifically, social media serve as an echo chamber where people are motivated to participate by perceiving a homogeneous opinion climate and forming a pro-protest attitude. In contrast, alternative media serve as an attitude intensifier to facilitate social movement participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]