Digital discussion spaces have changed the shape of discursive argumentation considerably. While there is not much explicit reasoning on Twitter, many users link to external resources in their tweets. This study zooms in on the justificatory capacity of those links and investigates their deliberative function on the platform. A qualitative exploration of material from four countries shows that links to external resources support Twitter discourse by regularly substantiating user statements in the context of both information and argumentation. Links with a truth-based informative function are posted to support deliberative truth claims with empirical evidence, thus adding primarily to theoretical discourses. Links with a norm-based argumentative function are shared to legitimate positions against social standards. They contribute to practical discourses about courses of action by sustaining deliberative claims for normative rightness. The country comparison suggests that societal divisions foster a norm-based argumentative rather than truth-based informative use of links on Twitter.

This study is the first to simultaneously investigate country-level and platform-related context factors of toxic outrage, that is, destructive incivility, in online discussions. It compares user comments on the public role of religion and secularism from 2015/16 in four democracies (Australia, United States, Germany, Switzerland) and four discussion arenas on three platforms (News websites, Facebook, Twitter). A novel automated content analysis ( N = 1,236,551) combines LIWC dictionaries with machine learning. The level of toxic outrage is higher in majoritarian than in consensus-oriented democracies and in arenas that afford plural, issue-driven rather than like-minded, preference-driven debates. Yet, toxic outrage is lower in forums that tend to separate public and private conversations than in those that collapse varying contexts. This suggests that user-generated discussions flourish in environments that incentivize actors to strive for compromise, put relevant issues center stage and make room for public debate at a relative distance from purely social conversation.

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This study is the first to compare the integrative complexity of online user comments across distinct democratic political systems and in discussion arenas with different primary use functions. Integrative complexity is a psycho-linguistic construct that is increasingly used by communication scholars to study the argumentative quality of political debate contributions. It captures the sophistication of online user comments in terms of differentiation and integration, mapping whether a post contains different aspects or viewpoints related to an issue and the extent to which it draws conceptual connections between these. This study investigates user contributions on the public role of religion and secularism in society between August 2015 and July 2016 from Australia, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. In each country, it analyzes user posts from the (a) website comment sections and (b) public Facebook pages of mainstream news media, from the (c) Facebook pages of partisan collective actors and alternative media, and from (d) Twitter. Almost as many user contributions implicitly or explicitly differentiate various dimensions of or perspectives on an issue as express unidimensional, simplistic thoughts. Conceptual integration, however, is rare. The integrative complexity of online user comments is higher in consensus-oriented than in majoritarian democracies and in arenas that are used primarily for issue-driven, plural discussions rather than preference-driven, like-minded debates. This suggests that the accommodative public debate cultures of consensus-oriented political systems and interactions with individuals who hold different positions promote more argumentatively complex over simple online debate contributions.