Picturing Polarized Posts on Palestine

Quite fittingly, a friend shared an article with interesting network images showing the extremely divided semantic and social spaces with respect to the war on Gaza.

The network images in the article were apparently constructed from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter data. Many of the images look like they were made with Gephi, but unfortunately the author doesn’t give sources for them.

While I think much of the semantic separation and “micro-propaganda” discussed in the article pre-dates social media, it is good to remember that our perception of events is increasingly filtered through our network of friends and amplified by story selection algorithms controlled by others. And it is perhaps comforting to see in these images some explanation for why otherwise seemingly sensible people can hold such shockingly different viewpoints: we are likely building our understanding of events from completely different sets of “facts” and narratives.