Did COVID-19 Blur Partisan Boundaries? A Comparison of Partisan Affinity and Source Heterophily in Online Alternative News-Sharing Networks Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study explores partisan and group heterophily within cross-platform online communities that share alternative news media content in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Austria. The analysis is related to the emergence of anti-systemic cross-partisan counter-publics in Europe that have gained momentum with the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent resistance against government restrictions. Comparing two periods (before and after the outbreak of COVID-19), we investigate whether these developments foster cross-partisan information sharing in online communities that form around right-wing, left-wing, and anti-systemic alternative news media content. Drawing on a network-analytical approach, we study networks formed around URL sharing of alternative news content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and VKontakte. Data include 30 million social media posts from January 2019 to September 2021. The results show that overall source heterophily in online alternative news networks increases slightly with the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly due to the increased proliferation of anti-system news. This increase is, however, not an expression of a more profound collapse of bi-partisan, left-right cleavages and is contingent on country contexts. Except for the time of the initial outbreak, the overall sharing of COVID-19-related content tends to increase rather than decrease partisan homophily. Finally, the results show that non-bi-partisan, anti-system media have had a significant effect on alternative media information ecosystems during the COVID-19 pandemic.