Deen Freelon

Analyzing online political discussion using three models of democratic communication

Research examining online political forums has until now been overwhelmingly guided by two broad perspectives: (1) a deliberative conception of democratic communication and (2) a diverse collection of incommensurable multi-sphere approaches. While these literatures have contributed many insightful observations, their disadvantages have left many interesting communicative dynamics largely unexplored. This article seeks to introduce a new framework for evaluating online political forums (based on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Lincoln Dahlberg) that addresses the shortcomings of prior approaches by identifying three distinct, overlapping models of democracy that forums may manifest: the liberal, the communitarian and the deliberative democratic. For each model, a set of definitional variables drawn from the broader online forum literature is documented and discussed.

Supporting reflective public thought with considerit

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIts affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion:

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.

Watching From Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring- related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the worlds attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.

Introduction to the Special Issue on New Media and Social Unrest

Scholarship addressing the impact of digital technologies on social movements, political unrest, states, and civil society has reached a turning point. Compared with the early days—just a decade ago—when scholars started cautiously exploring the potential impact of these emergent technologies, the past 2 years have seen a flood of cases against which these initial ideas and explorations can be examined empirically and conceptually. From the ongoing Arab uprisings in the Middle East and the North Africa region to the Occupy protests in the United States, from the Spanish Indignados movement of 2011 and 2012 to the turmoil around Wikileaks and Anonymous, many corners of the world have been affected by protests and social movements that have integrated the new tools of connectivity, information diffusion, and attention into their tactical repertoire of activism. In this special issue, we bring together a varied and complex set of articles that probe some of the many complex ways that emergent digital technologies have played a role in social unrest and politics around the world. With a decidedly global focus and a conceptually and methodologically rich toolkit, the authors seek to provide us with crucial perspectives on how digital technologies are altering politics, policy, and civics. These articles bring us both new analyses of recent events as well as fresh means of conceptually examining recent theories and speculations on the potential range of impacts of information technologies. These articles proceed beyond the simplistic questions that dominate mainstream debate about online politics to reveal complex, multilayered, and contingent effects. As they make clear, it no longer makes sense to ask if digital technologies will exercise influence; rather, we can and should be looking at how and, also crucially, through which mechanisms. It also makes little sense to ask if “the revolution will be tweeted”—the answer is yes, since Twitter and similar technologies are now integral components of the

Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide

ABSTRACT Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their pre-existing views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: accessing, considering, and producing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research.

TALKING AMONG THEMSELVES

The character of youth civic engagement on the internet has emerged as a productive topic of study in communication research. Concurrently, a number of recent studies of online forums have found that technological design features can powerfully influence both the form and content of civic discussion. The present study integrates these previously unacquainted literatures, contributing to each by comparing the user content of two online youth engagement forums: one of which tightly manages communication between participants and the other of which grants them far more expressive latitude. The results indicate that technical design matters: significantly more topics of a traditionally civic character were raised in the former than in the latter. Further, the expressive forum elicited twice the number of total posts than its counterpart, although the highly regulated forum attracted significantly more unique users. Notably, the populations posting in the two spaces were almost completely mutually exclusive, with the vast majority of users posting exclusively in one or the other. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of youth civic forums and youth civic engagement more generally.

Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest

The exercise of power has been an implicit theme in research on the use of social media for political protest, but few studies have attempted to measure social media power and its consequences directly. This study develops and measures three theoretically grounded metrics of social media power—unity, numbers, and commitment—as wielded on Twitter by a social movement (Black Lives Matter [BLM]), a counter-movement (political conservatives), and an unaligned party (mainstream news outlets) over nearly 10 months. We find evidence of a model of social media efficacy in which BLM predicts mainstream news coverage of police brutality, which in turn is the strongest driver of attention to the issue from political elites. Critically, the metric that best predicts elite response across all parties is commitment.

Online Fragmentation in Wartime A Longitudinal Analysis of Tweets about Syria, 2011–2013

Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users’ habits. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate tools and methods for such investigations. This study takes a step toward developing those methods. Drawing on the complete historical record of public retweets posted between January 2011 and August 2013, we propose and justify a partial method of measuring increases or decreases in network homophily. We demonstrate that Twitter network communities that focused on Syria are in general highly fragmented and homophilous; however, only one of the nine detected network communities that persisted over time exhibited a clear increase in homophily.

Focus On The Tech

Internet centrism, the notion that online tools play substantial roles in social and political processes, is frequently invoked by journalists, pundits, and academics. Existing research has explored this idea directly in the case of protest, attempting to discern the actual magnitude of the internet’s role in protest organization and mobilization. Taking a different approach, we conduct a content analysis to examine the extent to which internet centrism is discussed in articles about the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring in mainstream US newspapers and technology blogs. Our main findings are that the role of publication type in predicting internet centrism depends upon which protest is being discussed, and the role of protest type depends upon publication type. This study lends a theoretical perspective to an under-studied journalistic phenomenon with the potential to influence how audiences think about the causes and consequences of protests.