The political use and depolarizing role of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp in Ecuador’s 2021 National elections

This study evaluates the political uses of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp platforms in the context of the 2021 presidential and parliamentary elections in Ecuador and explores their relationship with individual political polarization. It highlights that the political scenario studied offers a complex situation, characterized by a great distrust of citizens toward political management during the COVID-19 pandemic, accompanied by a context of economic, social, and electoral crisis, all of which generated processes of extreme division of public opinion. This chapter has two main objectives: (a) to comparatively analyze the political use of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp platforms in the context of the national elections in Ecuador in 2021 and (b) to explore the relationship between different types of political behavior in social networks and political polarization. We find that political uses focused on maintaining contact with politically oriented groups, as well as interpersonal political mobilization, are inversely associated with political polarization, suggesting that political use of social media contributes to a depolarizing effect of individual political opinion. Thus, this result contradicts some of the literature that supports the polarizing impact of social media on the political spectrum. Therefore, the implications of the presented empirical results are discussed.