Debate, division, and diversity: Political discourse networks in USENET newsgroups (original) (raw)
Related papers
Opinion Diversity in Online Political Discussion Networks
Online Deliberation 2005, 2005
Do online political discussions tend to aggregate diverse voices in cross-cutting debate and deliberation. Or do? audiences? for online discussion tend to fragment into ideological echo chambers? In the wilds of threaded discussion on the internet (as opposed to deliberative polls, moderated discussions, and other designed venues of deliberation), networks of political discourse emerge from billions of individual choices by millions of individual citizens about what to discuss online, where to discuss it, and with whom. The tendency toward ...
To what extent do online discussion spaces expose participants to political talk and to cross-cutting political views in particular? Drawing on a representative national sample of over 1000 Americans reporting participation in chat rooms or message boards, we examine the types of online discussion spaces that create opportunities for cross-cutting political exchanges. Our findings suggest that the potential for deliberation occurs primarily in online groups where politics comes up only incidentally, but is not the central purpose of the discussion space. We discuss the implications of our findings for the contributions of the Internet to cross-cutting political discourse.
Friends, foes, and fringe: norms and structure in political discussion networks
2006
Abstract Online discussion groups have a network structure that emerges from the interactions of thousands of participants, writing in thousands of topical threads. This structure varies greatly according to the type of discussion group, such as technical, fan or support. Political groups have their own distinctive structure, organized around ideologically polarized clusters of participants.
The Contribution of the Internet to Political Discussion Network Heterogeneity
Journal of Communication, 2010
This study explores the intersection of media use, political discussion, and exposure to polit- ical difference through a focus on how Internet use might affect the overall heterogeneity of people’s political discussion networks. Advanced and tested herein is the inadvertency the- sis, which theorizes that limitations of selective exposure processes combined with weakened social boundaries found in the online environment suggest that people may be exposed to at least some additional political difference online, if only inadvertently. Hierarchical regression and mediation analyses confirm that online political discussion (directly) and online news (directly and indirectly) bear small yet significant relationships to the overall hetero- geneity of political discussion networks, and that partisanship moderates the relationship between online political discussion and political discussion network heterogeneity.
The Structure of Political Discussion Networks: A Model for the Analysis of E-Deliberation,
This paper shows that online political discussion networks are, on average, wider and deeper than the networks generated by other types of discussions: they engage a larger number of participants and cascade through more levels of nested comments. Using data collected from the Slashdot forum, this paper reconstructs the discussion threads as hierarchical networks and proposes a model for their comparison and classification. In addition to the substantive topic of discussion, which corresponds to the different sections of the forum (such as Developers, Games, or Politics), we classify the threads according to structural features like the maximum number of comments at any level of the network (i.e. the width) and the number of nested layers in the network (i.e. the depth). We find that political discussion networks display a tendency to cluster around the area that corresponds to wider and deeper structures, showing a significant departure from the structure exhibited by other types of discussions. We propose using this model to create a framework that allows the analysis and comparison of different internet technologies for the promotion of political deliberation.
This study examines the potential of Facebook to provide a channel of political deliberation during electoral campaigns. Through a comparative content analysis of user-generated political commentary on candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, it explores the technical role of moderators and moderators’ political ideology for online deliberation. Results show that social networking sites (SNSs) can represent spaces that accommodate a new public sphere and that quality deliberation can occur even in non-political platforms. However, the quality of online deliberation depends on the socio-political context in which it occurs rather than on the technological use of online spaces for deliberation. While political discourse in moderated sites showed more sophisticated argumentation, political ideology did not seem to matter for the quality of deliberation. Rather, the quality of the discourse depended on the particular candidate’s use of the Facebook platform as a tool to obtain different goals.
Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion
New Media & Society
Studies of political discussions online have been dominated by approaches that focus exclusively on deliberation, ignoring other equally relevant communication norms. This study conducts a normative assessment of discussion spaces in two prominent web platforms—Twitter hashtags and newspaper comment sections devoted to particular political issues—applying the norms of communitarianism, liberal individualism, and deliberation. The platforms’ distinct design features and users’ left/right issue stances emerge as significant predictors of normative differences.
This study examines the potential of Facebook to provide a channel of political deliberation during electoral campaigns. Through a comparative content analysis of user-generated political commentary on candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, it explores the technical role of moderators and moderators’ political ideology for online deliberation. Results show that social networking sites (SNSs) can represent spaces that accommodate a new public sphere and that quality deliberation can occur even in nonpolitical platforms. However, the quality of online deliberation depends on the sociopolitical context in which it occurs rather than on the technological use of online spaces for deliberation. Although political discourse in moderated sites showed more sophisticated argumentation, political ideology did not seem to matter for the quality of deliberation. Rather, the quality of the discourse depended on the particular candidate’s use of the Facebook platform as a tool to obtain different goals.