  The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the
platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection
(during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were
clustered into three different ideological groups - the Conservative Right, the
Moderate Right, and the Liberal Left - based on their retweeting of tweets
referring to the different political parties in Finland. Trends in polarisation
of several topics encompassing the most recent political crises - immigration,
climate change, COVID-19, and security policy - between these ideological
groups is analysed using network methods. To what extent the polarisation of
each topic aligns with the polarisation of the other topics is also studied. In
addition, the sharing of news links is examined in relation to the ideological
groups of the users as well as to the sentiment and the virality of the tweets
in which news links are shared.
