During times of crisis, fear may prompt a greater need for identity confirmation to reduce the uncertainty. People find comfort in identifying with an ingroup online, but this could worsen societal division. Our study analyzed Facebook discussions about COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war in order to identify the common patterns of economic and social uncertainties expressed through repeated narratives. We focused on the public Facebook pages of two Czech mainstream TV news outlets during two phases of each crisis and analyzed 1,680 comments with grounded theory’s coding procedures. The findings indicate that polarizing narratives resembling populist discourse are used to construct the identity of “the people” standing against “the elites”. We contribute to studies on social media radicalization by revealing its non-partisan character, as well as by showing that it occurs outside the fringe online spaces, in the online media mainstream.

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Time periods covered by the data: Covid 1: 02/28/2020 – 03/31/2020 | Covid 2: 02/28/2021 – 03/31/2021 | Ukraine 1: 02/23/2022 – 03/26/2022 | Ukraine 2: 02/23/2023 – 03/26/2023