2020
By Mark Boukes, Anne C. Kroon, and Theo Araujo
An often-researched question is whether online debate between citizens lives up to the democratic standards of a deliberative public sphere (e.g., Freelon, 2015; Jaidka, Zhou, & Lelkes, 2019). However, previous studies remained rather descriptive on the presence of certain speech elements. We instead want to investigate the following research question: How do online discussions take shape and what kind of user-comments may evoke subsequent comments of a higher/lower deliberative quality? To answer this RQ, we analyze the content of these posts using supervised machine learning and statistically model how discussions evolve over time to predict how certain types of response may influence the nature of later posted user-comments.
This project is reported in the following publications:
- Boukes, M., Chu, X., Noon, M. F. A., Liu, R., Araujo, T., & Kroon, A. C. (2021). Comparing user-content interactivity and audience diversity across news and satire: differences in online engagement between satire, regular news and partisan news. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 19(1), 98–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2021.1927928
- Boukes, M. (2024). Deliberation in online political talk: exploring interactivity, diversity, rationality, and incivility in the public spheres surrounding news vs. satire. Journal of Communication, jqae038. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae038.