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
IntroductionWith 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 provi...