Understanding the Internet and Social Media as the Means of Enhancing Democratic Deliberation: a Twitter Oriented Study

The Internet as a mega-collection of smaller communication networks has provided each individual the means to voice their opinion across the world. This capability has enabled a significant number of individuals to be heard by politicians and governments. Functions such as social media, as well as personal publishing (e.g. blogging), have provided a profound ease with which individuals can communicate their opinions to their elected and government representatives. Twitter is a social medium that has enabled almost real time communication between citizens and representatives, by means of short public messages (status updates or tweets). The report examines how the internet and Twitter specifically can contribute to democratic deliberation, examines usage data by the UK members of parliament and directorates and other institutions within the EU, and proposes a framework that will introduce a layer, enabling the explicit identification of the contribution of each tweet to the overall dialogue, based on the theory of argumentation.