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Teflonic social media behavior: why users refrain from participating in political discussions and why it matters
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Filtering strategies enable social media users to remove undesired content from their feeds, potentially creating homophilic environments. Although previous studies have addressed the individual-level factors and content features that influence these decisions, few have solely focused on users’ perceptions. Accordingly, this study applies social exchange theory to understand how users socially construct the process of unfriending. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with young Spaniards, we identify a widespread pattern of rejection over repetitive, opinion-challenging, and offensive posts, which we conceptualize as out-of-place content, a type of social media stimulus that hinders substantive online exchanges and challenges users’ understanding of social reality and individual values. This study contributes to current literature on unfriending by suggesting that filtering strategies are implemented gradually when posts overwhelm users’ tolerance threshold. Our findings also suggest that their deployment hinges on the closeness of the relationship between peers and social commitments formed in specific platforms. Future research is needed to assess to what extent the patterns identified in our interviews are present in the overall population.
Objectives
Scholars are increasingly investigating the role of citizens’ personality in activating political behavior. We test whether extraversion is associated to collective political activities (i.e., activities that include social interaction) and individual ones (i.e., activities that do not include social interactions).
Methods
We use originally collected survey data from five countries (Brazil, Korea, Russia, United States, United Kingdom).
Results
We found that extraversion is positively and directly related to collective political activities in Brazil, Korea and Russia. Results show no direct relationship between individual forms of political activities and extraversion. However, political discussion fully mediates the relationship between extraversion and individual forms of political activities in all five countries.
Conclusion
This study contributes to growing discussions on the role of personality traits in explaining political participation across countries, arguing that the relationship between extraversion and diverse forms of political participation are also context‐driven and nourished by political discussion.
This study examines the phenomena of political unfriending and content removal on social media in three Western democracies-France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We seek to understand the role of crosscutting discussion, confrontational discussion style, and ideological extremity in triggering unfriending and content removal on social media, while shedding light on crosscountry differences. The findings show that selective avoidance behaviors are much more common in the United States than either in France or the United Kingdom. They also show that crosscutting discussion and confrontational style are the predictors of selective avoidance across all the above countries, while ideological extremity plays a role in the United States only. We suggest that while social media provide opportunities for citizens to engage in discussions with people with dissimilar political views and socioeconomic backgrounds, they also allow them to easily reestablish more homophilous environments via content removal and tie dissolution.
This study examines citizen’s use of social media during the political crisis triggered by the Catalan Referendum. More specifically, we seek to shed more light on Catalan citizens’ (dis)engagement on social media, examining what citizens did and did not do on social media, who they avoided and/or unfriended, and the implications of such behaviours for democratic citizenship in Spain. Our findings, based on 50 interviews with Catalan citizens, show that despite strong political partisanship, Catalans show little inclination to discuss political issues online and consequently develop what we term a teflonic social media behaviour (TSMB). By implementing these avoidance tactics, they refrain from commenting and sharing political information about the Catalan conflict on social media. Furthermore, when they happen, political discussions are mainly triggered by blatant lies or fabricated content that citizens from both sides of the political spectrum want to confront based on their own real-world experiences. We find that despite the fact that the independence movement has undeniably fuelled social and political conflict, the unfriend button on social media was only used when specific norms of uncivility were breached rather than as a reaction to the mere exposure to dissonant views and opinions.
The ubiquitous nature of online news, especially in social media, increasingly exposes readers to news even when they are not seeking it. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews with Spanish incidental news consumers, we inductively explore the effects of incidental news consumption and problematize the phenomenology of encountering news passively on social media. Our results first question previous quantitative analysis on the potential positive effects of incidental news exposure, evidencing its minimal or null effects on how citizens make sense of, and are informed about, public affairs and politics. Second, our findings indicate that citizens appraisals of incidental news content varies according to the producers involved, the topics addressed and the interest triggered. Our study contributes to current discussions of incidental news exposure, arguing that both quantitative and qualitative studies should consider the direct and indirect impact of structural, cognitive and situational variables to holistically account for incidental news effects.
Social media (SM) allow citizens to not only read news but also express their political opinions. Drawing from cognitive appraisal and affective intelligence theory, this study investigated the affective foundation of political opinion expression on social media (POESM) using two-wave panel data. The results indicate that enthusiasm and anger stimulated POESM but only for individuals with a minimum threshold motivation to use SM for political purposes. Among the politically motivated, anxiety increased POESM for individuals with low political knowledge but lessened POESM for ones with high political knowledge. Thus, emotional states can be powerful drivers of POESM. In contexts with low levels of POESM, emotions may stimulate online discussion as well as contribute to the further emotionalization of political debates.
“Respectability politics” describes a self-presentation strategy historically adopted by African-American women to reject White stereotypes by promoting morality while de-emphasizing sexuality. While civil rights activists and feminists criticize respectability politics as reactionary, subordinated groups frequently use these tactics to gain upward mobility. This paper analyzes how upwardly mobile young people of low socio-economic status in New York City manage impressions online by adhering to normative notions of respectability. Our participants described how they present themselves on social media by self-censoring, curating a neutral image, segmenting content by platform, and avoiding content and contacts coded as lower class. Peers who post sexual images, primarily women, were considered unrespectable and subject to sexual shaming. These strategies reinforce racist and sexist notions of appropriate behavior, simultaneously enabling and limiting participants’ ability to succeed. We extend the impression management literature to examine how digital media mediates the intersection of class, gender, and race.
Drawing on recent literature on fake news, this working paper sheds light on the demographic factors and situational predictors that influence the probability to share political fake news through social media platforms. By using a representative sample of 1.002 US adults from the Pew Research Center, the results of the logistic regression analysis revealed relationships between the probability to share political fake news online and predictor variables such as demographics (age, gender, political orientation and income), and situational factors (perception of frequency of political fake news online, previous unconsciously fake news sharing and perception of responsibility [of different agents]). The research offers evidence regarding the prototype user that contributes to the spread of misinformation and the main implications that this phenomenon entails for professional journalism.
In the context of the United States, research shows a positive relationship between network heterogeneity and political expression on social media at the individual level. This study builds on that research, relying on multilevel analysis that (1) leverages a twenty-country comparative survey and (2) includes country-level data on freedom of expression. Results show a positive relationship between network heterogeneity and political expression on social media across countries, but that relationship is stronger where freedom of expression is more limited. Keywords social media, political expression, network heterogeneity, freedom of expression index, democracy, political communication This paper examines how a country's freedom of expression shapes "risky" political expression on social media. Political expression has flourished on social media (Halpern and Gibbs 2013; Vaccari et al. 2015), and individuals who express their political views in these environments enjoy an increasingly substantial role, alongside political and media elites, in shaping public narratives about political issues in Western societies (Chadwick 2017; K. Thorson and Wells 2015). Recent research in the
Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These “dark social media” are important spaces for “public connection,” a means for bridging people’s private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks that rely on dark social media for communication. Arguing that the use of these platforms is foremost a social practice, the study employs focus groups with local, work, and leisure-related communities to investigate questions of inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness associated with sharing and discussing news. We find the perceived value of news on dark social media hinges on the control and privacy it provides. Community type was less significant than communicative aims of the group for shaping the uptake of news and journalism.
This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semistructured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media.
Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform’s architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice.
Conventional models of agenda setting hold that mainstream media influence the public agenda by leading audience attention, and perceived importance, to certain issues. However, increased selectivity and audience fragmentation in today’s digital media environment threaten the traditional agenda-setting power of the mass media. An important development to consider in light of this change is the growing use of social media for entertainment and information. This study investigates whether mainstream media can influence the public agenda when channeled through social media. By leveraging an original, longitudinal experiment, I test whether being exposed to political information through Facebook yields an agenda-setting effect by raising participants’ perceived importance of certain policy issues. Findings show that participants exposed to political information on Facebook exhibit increased levels of issue salience consistent with the issues shared compared with participants who were not shown political information; these effects are strongest among those with low political interest.
The article explores how a group of young people in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom experience and manage informal political talk on Facebook. Based on 60 interviews with 14- to 25-year-olds with diverse interest and participation in politics, it understands political talk as a social achievement dependent on the situational definition, shaped by the perceived imagined audiences, shared expectations, and technological affordances. Results show that young people construct different interactional contexts on Facebook depending on their political experiences, but also on their understanding of the affordances of networked publics as shaped by the social norms of their peer groups. Many youth define Facebook as an unsafe social setting for informal political discussions, thus adhering to a form of “publicness” aimed at neutralizing conflicts. Others, instead, develop different forms of “publicness” based on emergent communicative skills that help them manage the uncertainty of social media as interactional contexts.
Amid growing concerns over the contentious tenor of online political discourse, scholars have begun to recognize that the social contexts and affordances provided by social media may present indirect pathways from online political discussion to offline political participation. Less work has addressed how users’ motivations for using social media might influence such dynamics. In this study, we use two-wave panel survey data collected in the United States to test the possibility that online cross-cutting discussion involving political disagreement can encourage users to share political information on social media, which in turn can increase their offline political engagement. We also test how specific motivations for using social media (i.e., political engagement, relationship maintenance, and self-promotion) moderate the amount users share political information on social media when engaged in conversations involving political disagreement. Our results find that increased online cross-cutting political discussion indirectly affects offline political participation through the influence of social media political information sharing. We also observe that this indirect effect is stronger for users who are motivated to use social media for either political engagement or relationship maintenance (but not self-promotion) purposes. Our findings advance one route from online political disagreement to offline political action, which can impact both politically and nonpolitically motivated social media users.
This study examines citizens’ willingness to publicly express support for a political party or candidate face-to-face and on Facebook during an election. Findings from a national survey showed that fear of social isolation (FSI) exhibited a negative indirect effect on public expression about the election through willingness to self-censor (WTSC) for both communication environments. The indirect effect through WTSC was contingent on perceived political disagreement within homophilous peer networks contributing to a hostile opinion climate. Moreover, in face-to-face interactions those with higher levels of FSI were less likely to express support in heterogeneous offline networks with high levels of disagreement, but were more likely to do so in homophilous networks that share similar political views. The study demonstrates the utility of combining a dispositional approach and friendship-based reference groups to the examination of key spiral of silence mechanisms at the individual level.
Social media users are able to read, share, and discuss news online with other people coming from diverse contexts in their lives, including family members, co-workers, and friends. Past research has indicated that “context collapse” occurs when people must imagine and negotiate interacting with a large and diverse online audience. Using survey data from 771 US Internet users, we find that more context collapse in people’s Facebook friends is positively related to both sharing and reading news. Furthermore, reading news on Facebook mediates the relationship between context collapse and news sharing. Finally, privacy management moderates the relationship between reading and sharing news on Facebook, where people who are more open in their privacy management practices share more news.
Selective exposure is a growing concern as people become more reliant on social media for political information. While self-reports often ask about exposure to political content on social media, existing research does not account for the fact that even those exposed to political content may still choose to ignore it. To effectively account for this, we employ corneal eye tracking software, such that we can observe users’ gaze and the amount of time they actually spend with political content. Consistent with expectations, the earlier a cue that a post is political, the faster a user skips over it. This trend is concentrated among those least interested in politics. Implications for how we think about social media and political information flows in the modern media environment are discussed.
This article investigates political disagreement on social media in comparison to face-to-face and anonymous online settings. Because of the structure of social relationships and the social norms that influence expression, it is hypothesized that people perceive more political disagreement in social media settings versus face-to-face and anonymous online settings. Analyses of an online survey of adults in the United States show that (a) social media users perceive more political disagreement than non-users, (b) they perceive more of it on social media than in other communication settings, and (c) news use on social media is positively related to perceived disagreement on social media. Results are discussed in light of their implications for current debates about the contemporary public sphere and directions for future research.
Social media allow users some degree of control over the content to which they are exposed, through blocking, unfriending, or hiding feeds from other users. This article considers the extent to which they do so for political reasons. Survey data from Pew Research suggests that political unfriending is relatively rare, with fewer than 10% of respondents engaging in the practice. Analysis finds support for the idea that political unfriending is most common among those who talk about politics, those strongest in ideology, those that see the most politics in social media, and those that perceive the greatest political disagreement in their social networks. This suggests that social media are not exacerbating the political information gap as political information on social media is likely still reaching the least politically engaged, whereas the most politically engaged may opt out of political information within social media but still receive it elsewhere.
Historically, major gender differences exist in both political engagement and online content creation. Expanding on these literatures, this study considers the extent to which men and women engage in politics specifically in social media. Novel survey data are employed to test for any gendered differences in encountering and responding to political content via social media. Despite measuring a robust set of political behaviors within social media, few gender differences emerge. Where differences do emerge, they are most likely among the most visible political behaviors, suggesting that women may strategically engage in less visible or less-likely-to-offend political behaviors, as compared to men. This poses important questions regarding political participation, representation, and gender.
When people construct and share posts on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, whom do they imagine as their audience? How do users describe this imagined audience? Do they have a sub-audience in mind (e.g., “friends who like reality television”)? Do they share more broadly and abstractly (e.g., “the public”)? Do such imaginings fluctuate each time a person posts? Using a mixed-methods approach involving a 2-month-long diary study of 119 diverse American adults and their 1,200 social network site posts, supplemented with follow-up interviews (N = 30), this study explores the imagined audience on social network sites. The findings reveal that even though users often interacted with large diverse audiences as they posted, they coped by envisioning either very broad abstract imagined audiences or more targeted specific imagined audiences composed of personal ties, professional ties, communal ties, and/or phantasmal ties. When people had target imagined audiences in mind, they were most often homogeneous and composed of people’s friends and family. Users’ imaginings typically fluctuated among these audience types as they posted even though the potential audience as per their posts’ privacy settings often did not change. The findings provide a list of audience types, as well as detailed descriptions, examples, and frequencies on which future research can build. With people’s online presence playing an important role for their reputations, these findings provide more insight into for whom people are managing their privacy and whom they have in mind as they share.
News use via social media has been linked to pro-democratic political behaviors. However, most people use social media for non-political purposes, like connecting with friends and browsing news feeds. Recent research indicates these behaviors may also have democratic benefits, by means of political expression in social media. Drawing on panel data from a nationally representative sample, this study extends this line of research by exploring how social interaction and news-seeking behaviors on social media lead to diverse networks, exposure to dissenting political opinion, and ultimately reconsidering and changing one’s political views. Social media are a unique communication platform, and their attributes might influence exposure to political information. The tendency for users to build and maintain friend networks creates a potential deliberative space for political persuasion to take place. Consistent with prior literature, news use leads to political persuasion. More interestingly, apolitical, but social interactive uses of social media also lead to political persuasion. These relationships are partially mediated through network and discussion attributes.
This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement.
Western democracies have seen a decrease in political participation, with young people singled out as the most problematic group. But young people are also the most avid users of online media. It has therefore been argued that online media could be used to evoke their interest in politics, and thus contribute to the reinvigoration of democratic citizenship. Using a mixed qualitative methods approach, this article takes a closer look at 26 young Swedes’ experiences and understandings of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, as used for political discussions. Compared to the average Swedish 17 to 18-year-olds, the participants are relatively interested in civic and political questions. By focusing on this segment, the article mirrors the experiences of an understudied group – young people who are interested in politics but not engaged. The participants were skeptical about social media as used in relation to politics, and expressed doubts about their suitability and usefulness. Four themes were identified, where three have to do with perceived risks: for conflict, misunderstandings and deceit. The participants also expressed the idea of online political activities as being less authentic than their offline equivalents. The idea that young people want and expect something that political organizations cannot live up to is one of the most dominant discourses that characterize the discussion on youth political participation today. However, while some properties of social media fit well into what young people have been found to prefer, for the participants, negative traits seem to outweigh the positive ones, thus discouraging them from participating.
Employing original two-wave national panel survey data, this study examines the mediating role of discussion network heterogeneity on social media in the relationship between social media use for news/information and civic engagement. This study also investigates whether such indirect effects of social media use on civic participation are contingent on individuals’ extraversion personality. The results indicate that discussion network heterogeneity mediates the relationship between citizens’ social media use for news/information and their civic engagement. In other words, social media use for information positively influences individuals’ discussion network heterogeneity on social network sites, which consequently contributes to increased levels of civic engagement. In addition, this indirect effect of social media use on civic participation through network heterogeneity is stronger for introverted individuals. The implications of these findings are discussed.
We test the Spiral of Silence theory about Internet use in Japanese Internet society. We looked at Twitter and analyzed whether the Spiral of Silence theory would hold for it. Twitter’s speed and scope of information dissemination is fast and extremely wide ranging. For these reasons, Twitter is an appropriate field for analyzing the influences of the Internet on the formation of public opinion. By integrating social investigation and behavioral log analysis, we test a model that incorporates an individual’s attitudes (measured via a questionnaire) and an individual’s communication network structure and actual communication behavior (measured via behavior log analysis). The results from our analysis show a positive correlation between individuals’ perception that their opinion represents the majority view and the number of times they have spoken out. Moreover, while homogeneity of opinions of a personal network on Twitter influenced speaking out by a majority group, homogeneity of opinions does not influence speaking out by a minority group.
The corrective action hypothesis predicts that hostile media perceptions and presumed media influence will be positively related
to expressive political behaviors. According to this hypothesis, the presumed influence of biased media makes people attempt
to “correct” perceived “wrongs” by voicing their own opinions in the public sphere. This study predicts that people with higher
levels of hostile media perceptions and presumed media influence will talk politics more often and will seek out a wider array
of viewpoints in political conversation. Analysis of survey data from a national representative sample of adults in Colombia
largely supports these hypotheses, and also shows that presumed media influence mediates the relationship between hostile
media perceptions and political talk diversity.
In todays’ progressively polarized society, social media users are increasingly exposed to blatant uncivil comments, dissonant views, and controversial news contents, both from their peers and the media organizations they follow. Recent scholarship on selective avoidance suggests that citizens when exposed to contentious stimuli tend to either neglect, avoid, or by-pass such content, a practice scholarly known as users’ filtration tactics or unfriending. Drawing upon a nationally representative panel survey from the United States (W1 = 1,338/W2 = 511) fielded in 2019/2020, this study seeks to a) examine whether social media news use is associated to exposure to uncivil political discussions, and 2) explore the ways in which both constructs causally affect users’ unfriending behavior. Finally, the study investigates the contingent moderating role of uncivil political discussion in energizing the relationship between social media use for news and unfriending. Our findings first find support for the idea that social media news use directly activates citizens’ uncivil discussions and unfriending, while uncivil political discussion directly triggers unfriending behavior and significantly contributes to intensify the effect of social media news use over citizens’ unfriending levels. These findings add to current conversations about the potential motivations and deleterious effects of social media filtering in contemporary democracies.
This study examines the role of political cynicism in emotions, online campaign information seeking, and online political expression. Data from a two-wave online panel survey conducted before the 2016 U.S. presidential election reveal that cynicism is related positively to anger and anxiety and negatively to enthusiasm. Cynicism is also positively related to online campaign information seeking indirectly through anxiety. This indirect relationship is moderated by perceived exposure to insult campaigning, such that the relationship is stronger for those who thought they were often exposed to insulting campaign rhetoric. Data also show that cynicism is negatively associated with online political expression through reduced enthusiasm.
While significant research exists highlighting the role of impression management and disclosure online as it relates to the development of relationships, more work is needed to explore how relational transgressions can affect the maintenance of various ties within one's social network. Drawing on the evaluation and forecasting components of social penetration theory (SPT), this research seeks to extend SPT to online communication by investigating how relationships are potentially dissolved through social networking sites (SNSs). This study used a survey and multi-level modeling (N = 312, cases = 3062) to examine reasons why a user may terminate or hide a relationship on their social network. Results suggest that in weighing the rewards and costs of a relationship most users heavily favor taking no action in the face of an infraction online (e.g., oversharing) rather than unfriending or unfollowing. However, strength of tie, how regularly someone uses SNSs, the size of the social network, and site used each influenced the decision to unfriend or hide.
On October 31, 2013, thousands of Twitter accounts, automated to actively retweet President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, were unexpectedly closed by the social media platform. I exploit this event to study the relationship between perceived popularity on social media (amplified through the use of bot accounts) and online political expression. The analysis uses more than two hundred thousand tweets spanning six months around the event and employs a quasi-experimental empirical framework. Following the closure of the accounts, the volume of tweets mentioning the president increased by an estimated 33 percent, with a differential increase for critical messages. Relative to tweets by government leaders, the number of likes for tweets by opposition leaders increased by an estimated 21 percent. Consistent with the presence of a spiral of silence in online political expression, the results suggest that the change in the perceived popularity of Maduro led to an increase in users’ willingness to express both criticism of the president and support for the opposition. While previous studies have documented how autocratic governments engage in manipulative online campaigns, this paper provides evidence of their effectiveness and highlights an important mechanism through which they can influence behavior.
Using a method incorporating both survey and trace data measures and the framework of social identity theory, this study presents a model for understanding political talk on Facebook. It found substantial and statistically significant relationships between offline civic engagement, bonded social capital, and political attitude extremity. It also identifies a substantive relationship between civic engagement, social capital, and political talk on Facebook. Specifically, online civic engagement was robustly associated with political content generation on Facebook.
One reason why people avoid using social media to express their opinions is to avert social sanctions as proposed by the spiral of silence theory. We here elaborate on individual-level sensitivity to social rejection in relation to voicing political opinions on social media sites. Given the uncertainty about sharing political views in social media, and the fact that social acceptance, or rejection, can be easily communicated through, for instance, likes, or a lack of likes, we argue that rejection sensitive individuals are less likely to share political information in social media. Combining an analysis of unique survey data on psychological characteristics and online political activity with focus group interviews with Swedish youth supports our argument, showing that rejection sensitive individuals are less inclined to engage politically in social media. The results extend on previous research by establishing the role of rejection sensitivity in political engagement in social media.
This article is a systematic large-scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups that are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups that sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are particularly likely to have lower patterns of interaction. Indeed, exchanges between centrists who sit on different sides of the left–right divide are more likely than connections between centrists and extremists who are from the same ideological wing. In light of the results, theory about exposure to different ideological viewpoints online is enhanced.
Using two-wave panel data from Hong Kong, this study examines the spiral of silence process on social media. It extends the theoretical framework by including both supporting and disagreeing opinion expression and examining not only expressive but also withdrawal behaviors on social media. This study also investigates the moderating roles of disagreement and publicness as two affordances on social media that influence the spiral of silence process. Results from the moderated mediation model with a panel lagged and autoregressive analysis suggest that fear of social isolation (FSI) has an indirect effect on discouraging disagreeing opinion expression but not supporting opinion expression and on encouraging withdrawal behaviors through enhancing willingness to self-censor (WTSC) on social media. This indirect effect is contingent on the levels of disagreement and publicness in one’s network. Higher levels of disagreement and publicness promote the spiral of silence. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Harnessing social media such as Facebook is now considered critical for electoral success. Although Facebook is widely used by the electorate, few have ‘Liked’ the Facebook pages of the political candidates for whom they vote. To provide understanding of this discrepancy, the present paper offers the first investigation on the role of audience diversity on ‘Liking’ behavior, as well as its association with varying degrees of social anxiety that may arise from ‘Liking’ political candidates. A survey of potential voters who used Facebook preceding the 2016 Presidential Election was conducted (n = 1027). Using the lens of Self-Presentation Theory, results found that for those who had not already ‘Liked’ Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, their intention to do so before the election was negatively associated with the diversity of their Facebook audience. This relationship was mediated by their expected degree of social anxiety from ‘Liking’ the candidate. A comparison of audience diversity of participants who had ‘Liked’ a candidate vs. those who had not ‘Liked’ a candidate also showed that increased audience diversity hinders ‘Liking’. This paper contributes to the knowledge of engagement with politicians through social media as well as the study of audience diversity more generally. Implications for managers are provided.
This study analyzes the relationship between online voter mobilization and political engagement in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the 2014 European election campaign. Internet surveys of samples representatives of these countries’ populations with Internet access show that respondents who received an invitation to vote for a party or candidate via e-mail or social media engaged in a significantly higher number of political activities than those who did not. Moreover, the relationship between mobilization and engagement was stronger among those who followed the campaign less attentively, as well as in countries where overall levels of engagement with the campaign were lower (Germany and the United Kingdom) than where they were higher (Italy). These findings indicate that online mobilization may contribute to closing gaps in political engagement at both individual and aggregate levels, and thus suggest that digital media may contribute to reviving democratic citizenship.
Social Network Sites (SNSs) offer a plethora of privacy controls, but users rarely exploit all of these mechanisms, nor do they do so in the same manner. We demonstrate that SNS users instead adhere to one of a small set of distinct privacy management strategies that are partially related to their level of privacy feature awareness. Using advanced Factor Analysis methods on the self-reported privacy behaviors and feature awareness of 308 Facebook users, we extrapolate six distinct privacy management strategies, including: Privacy Maximizers, Selective Sharers, Privacy Balancers, Self-Censors, Time Savers/Consumers, and Privacy Minimalists and six classes of privacy proficiency based on feature awareness, ranging from Novices to Experts. We then cluster users on these dimensions to form six distinct behavioral profiles of privacy management strategies and six awareness profiles for privacy proficiency. We further analyze these privacy profiles to suggest opportunities for training and education, interface redesign, and new approaches for personalized privacy recommendations.
Opinion expressions on Facebook are characterized by “click speech” in which people express their opinions and support (or disagreement) of posts through the “like,” “comment,” and “share” buttons. This study uses a 2 (low vs. high opinion congruency) x 2 (message civility vs. incivility) between-subject factorial experiment to examine the spiral of silence on participants’ likelihood to interact with social media. We randomly assigned 502 participants to one of four experimental conditions. Results indicate that the fear of isolation increased the likelihood of commenting on Facebook posts and a civil climate increased the likelihood of liking comments on Facebook posts. Findings suggest that “click-speech” could be considered a form of opinion expression.
The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into context collusions and context collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts.
Swedish newspapers have hosted Web pages since the mid-1990s, and are often pointed to as some of the most popular online locations in the Swedish-speaking online sphere. These organizations have also taken to social media, maintaining presences on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The current study is focused on the latter of the two. It features a twofold aim, detailing the types of content provided by the four largest Swedish newspapers on their Facebook pages, and the types and levels of interaction this content is met with by their page visitors. For tabloid newspapers in particular, the types of news most provided (human interest-type stories) are not matched by the types of news most interacted with by the audience members. Possible reasons for and implications of this apparent imbalance are discussed.
This work proposes the expectation of sanctions as a promising construct to advance spiral of silence research in face-to-face and computer-mediated contexts. We argue that situational factors influence people’s expectations about how their social environment would punish them should they express their viewpoint in a hostile opinion climate. These expected sanctions are suggested to explain the variance in people’s willingness to express a minority opinion across different social situations. An experiment showed that the expectation of being personally attacked can explain why people are more willing to voice a deviant opinion in offline rather than online environments. Findings also revealed that in contemporary social networking websites, wherein users commonly face a personally relevant audience, people are prone to hold back their opinion as they expect losing control over the reactions of their audience. This research extends previous knowledge by presenting a more differentiated theoretical view of the fear of isolation and specifying its role in different situations of public deliberation.
We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.
© The Author(s) 2015.
Despite the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding online cultural production, profound gender inequalities remain in who contributes to one of the most visited Web sites worldwide, Wikipedia. In analyzing this persistent disparity, previous research has focused on aspects of current contributors and the existing Wikipedia community. We draw on unique panel survey data of young adults with information about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We examine the role of people's background attributes and Internet skills in participation on the site. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly significant Internet skills gap. Our results show that the most likely contributors are high-skilled males and that among low-skilled Internet users no gender gap in Wikipedia contributions exists. Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.