Disciplining the digital public: Platform mechanisms and the dynamics of emotional polarization

Changrong Lu, Dan Qin, Jiali Huang and Bing Pang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 8, 1-23

Abstract: Digital platforms increasingly mediate political communication and public opinion formation, raising urgent questions about how Bigtech firms are associated with behavioral norm formation and affective dynamics. This study develops the concept of platform disciplinary mechanisms to examine how interface design, algorithmic recommendation, and interaction feedback correspond to behavioral standardization, cognitive dependency, and emotionally structured group differentiation across online communities. Using a platform-end user-community framework, we investigate whether technological conditions associated with platform governance correspond to systematic changes in emotional polarization within the platform-mediated information environment. We conduct a time-series analysis linking a daily emotional polarization indicator derived from aggregated news sentiment (GDELT) to technology-category intensity measures extracted from Bigtech research outputs indexed in the Web of Science. Because the polarization indicator is based on news sentiment rather than user traces, it captures emotional polarization in the information environment rather than individual psychological states. Treating 2020 as a theory-informed analytic breakpoint, we find that emotional polarization becomes more persistent after 2020 and is more strongly associated with higher levels of technological simplification and emotion-oriented interaction dynamics. These findings are consistent with the view that major platforms are linked to changes in public-opinion dynamics in platform-mediated environments characterized by affective governance. They also suggest that regulation should pay greater attention to structural mechanisms of behavioral normalization and affective manipulation beyond content moderation alone.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0342143

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0342143

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