Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System
Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System
Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities
Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities
Characterizing E-Participation in Policy-Making
HICSS '04 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 5 - Volume 5
User Participation in Social Media: Digg Study
WI-IATW '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops
Finding high-quality content in social media
WSDM '08 Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
Facebook: The enabler of online civic engagement for activists
Computers in Human Behavior
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This manuscript aims to assess the potential of social media as a channel to foster democratic deliberation. It does this by examining whether the types of discussions that citizens maintain in two of the most used social media channels managed by the White House - Facebook and YouTube - meet the necessary conditions for deliberative democracy. For this purpose 7230 messages were analyzed and assessed in terms of indicators developed to evaluate online discourse derived from the work of Habermas. By contrasting social media channels that differ in the affordances of identifiability and networked information access (two traditional predictors of online deliberation), we seek to contribute a deeper understanding of social media and its impact on deliberation. Drawing on the social identification/deindividuation (SIDE) model of computer mediated communication and network theories, we predict that political discussions in Facebook will present a more egalitarian distribution of comments between discussants and higher level of politeness in their messages. Consistent with our theoretical framework, results confirm that Facebook expands the flow of information to other networks and enables more symmetrical conversations among users, whereas politeness is lower in the more anonymous and deindividuated YouTube.