Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look

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. Keywords: public sphere, social stratification, conflict, political communication, twitter 1 Introduction With the rapid growth of Twitter, it has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for online communication. Besides using it for relationship formation and maintenance, many people also regularly engage in discussions about controversial issues [1]. On one hand, this increasing adoption of Twitter for online deliberation inevitably creates a perfect environment for open and unrestricted conversations. On the other hand, individuals on Twitter tend to associate more with like-minded others and to receive information selectively. This leads the cyber-pessimist to emphasize the vital role of opinion leaders in shaping others’ perceptions during a conflict and to foresee the online environment as a disguise for those in higher social hierarchy to disseminate information. In order to empirically understand whether Twitter creates a public sphere for democratic debates we ask questions like: How do people on different sides of ideological trenches engage with each other on Twitter? How much does social stratification matter in this process? And how universal are such patterns across different types of polarized conflicts? For our study, we choose three conflicts of very different nature: the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Democrat-Republication political polarization, and the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid football rivalry. Our analysis is guided by four assessment metrics for the democratic public sphere introduced by [2], namely, (i) equality, (ii) diversity, (iii) reciprocity, and (iv) quality. We find that in general Twitter is not an idealized space for democratic, rational cross-ideological debate, as individuals from the bottom social hierarchy not only interact less but also provide lower quality comments in inter-ideological communication. We believe our results advance the understanding of opportunities and limitations provided by Twitter in online conflicts. It is also of relevance for the design and development of conflict intervention tools or procedures as we paint a detailed picture of cross-ideological communication. Most of this work was done while the first author was at Qatar Computing Research Institute. 2 Related Work The notion of public sphere is defined by Habermas as democratic space for open and transparent communication among publics [3]. In his view, a public sphere was conceived as a space in which: first, communicators are supposed to disregard their social status, so that better argument could win out over social hierarchy. Second, debates should focus on issues of common concerns and should discursively formulate core values. Third, everyone should be able to access and take part in the public debates. With the advent of the Internet, some optimistic researchers viewed it as a better public sphere than traditional media considering its high reach [4, 5], anonymity [6], diversity and interactivity [2]. In contrast, pessimistic scholars claimed that online discourse oftentimes ends in miscommunication and cannot directly enhance democracy [7]. Also, individuals within the same deliberating group online usually end up at a more extreme position in the same general direction [8, 9] due to selective exposure [10, 11]. In addition, [8] rejected the claim that social stratification is leveled out by the "blindness" of cyberspace, and argued that even in online environment social hierarchy hindered the democratic process of inter-personal communication. In recent years, the center of the debate has been changed from "Internet as public sphere" to "SNS as public sphere". Optimists argued that the features and tools provided by SNS facilitate communication between individuals, and may be a better means of achieving a true public sphere than anything that has come before it [12, 13]. In contrast, [14, 15] claimed that certain Facebook designs make it a difficult platform for public discourse. In addition, [16-19] noticed that individuals on SNS formed dense clusters that were ideologically homogeneous, although [20] proposed a completely different view, stating that Twitter users tend to share news without bias. To have a more comprehensive understanding of the afore-mentioned works, in Table 1 we performed a classification of the existing literatures according to the type of platform being studied, as well as Habermas’s criteria of public sphere. We colored the literatures to indicate whether it is in support of or against a public sphere. Platform Equality Inclusiveness Argument Rationality Disregard Hierarchies Equal Accessibility Interaction Scale Interaction Diversity Website, Blog, Forum [8] [4] [6] [8] [21] [2] [5] [21] [2] [6] [2] [10] [11] [21] [2] SNS [14] [12] [13] [14] [12] [13] [20] [28] [18] [17] [16] [14] [15] [15] [14] Table 1. Review of literatures on public sphere. Red indicates evidence in support of a public sphere, blue indicates