Abstract
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media’s personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, explain how social media can lead to selective exposure and can be used as a disguise for those in power to disseminate biased information. To investigate this debate empirically, we evaluate Twitter as a public sphere using four metrics: equality, diversity, reciprocity and quality. Using these measurements, we analyze the communication patterns between individuals of different hierarchical levels and ideologies. We do this within the context of three diverse conflicts: Israel-Palestine, US Democrats-Republicans, and FC Barcelona-Real Madrid. In all cases, we collect data around a central pair of Twitter accounts representing the two main parties. Our results show in a quantitative manner that Twitter is not an ideal public sphere for democratic conversations and that hierarchical effects are part of the reason why it is not.
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Liu, Z., Weber, I. (2014). Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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