Talking Politics Online: How Facebook Generates Clicks But Undermines Discussion
7 Pages Posted: 6 Nov 2015
Date Written: November 4, 2015
Abstract
Many citizens in advanced democracies read and discuss the news online through social media platforms. How does this change influence deliberative quality? We compare three commenting architectures used by the Huffington Post between January 2013 - February 2015, characterised respectively by easy anonymity, stable pseudonyms, and real name identities through Facebook. These phases provide a natural experiment with which to compare a number of indicators of argumentative engagement. We find that across the board, pseudonymous commenting yielded much higher levels of reason giving than either anonymous or Facebook’s real name environment. By focusing not on exposure to cross-cutting information but rather on the quality of discursive engagement, our study adds an important corrective to recent research (1) addressing the potential effect of Facebook on polarization.
Keywords: deliberation, polarization, public sphere, commenting, anonymity, identities online
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