유튜브 뉴스의 사회적시청 과정에서 정치표현이 정치적 태도극화에 미치는 영향

초록

The rise of YouTube as a primary news source has raised concerns about the escalation of political polarization. In order to investigate the mechanism through which watching news on YouTube contributes to political polarization, this study focuses on the relationships between social viewing, partisan political expression, cross-cutting political expression, and partisan news media exposure. Exploring these relationships goes beyond a simple quantitative understanding of news consumption and provides insight into how users’ active engagement, exposure to diverse perspectives, expressive behavior, and communication with others interact in the news consumption process. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, it was found that the effect of social viewing of YouTube news on political polarization was mediated by political expression. Specifically, individuals who engaged in higher levels of social viewing were more likely to engage in cross-cutting political expression, which in turn reduced political polarization. At the same time, those who engaged in higher levels of social viewing also tended to increase their partisan political expression, which led to a rise in political polarization. These results suggest that social viewing of news on YouTube can either exacerbate or mitigate political polarization. Another noteworthy finding is that, during the social viewing of news on YouTube the weaker the tendency toward partisan news media exposure, the more pronounced the mitigating effect of cross-cutting political expression on political polarization. Specifically, the group with a weak tendency toward partisan news media exposure showed the strongest mitigation effect on political polarization, and even the group with an average tendency exhibited a statistically significant mitigating effect. However, in the group with a strong tendency toward partisan news media exposure, no mitigating effect of cross-cutting political expression on political polarization was observed. Meanwhile, in the pathway from social viewing of YouTube news to political polarization through partisan political expression, no moderated mediation effect was found for partisan news media exposure. In other words, political polarization was found to intensify across all groups, regardless of their degree of partisan news media exposure. These findings suggest that cross-cutting political expression plays a critical role in mitigating political polarization in the context of YouTube news consumption. In order to encourage such cross-cutting political expression, it is essential to move beyond selective exposure based on political orientation and make efforts to utilize a variety of media sources. This can be explained by the results of this study, which demonstrate that consuming news from diverse perspectives—through the moderating effect of partisan news media exposure—plays a key role in reducing political polarization. These findings are meaningful in that they broaden our understanding of how social viewing of news on YouTube influences political polarization.

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