6,322 research outputs found
Deliberative Qualities of Online Abortion Discourse: Incivility and Intolerance in the American and Irish Abortion Discussions on Twitter
No full textThis project contains the classifier code and dictionary files for the publication of: Oh, D., Elayan, S., & Sykora, M. (2023). Deliberative Qualities of Online Abortion Discourse: Incivility and Intolerance in the American and Irish Abortion Discussions on Twitter. Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 19(1)
From civility to parity : Marxist-feminist ethics for context-aware algorithmic content moderation
No full textAlgorithmic content moderation governs online speech on large-scale commercial platforms, often under the guise of neutrality. Yet, it routinely reproduces white, middle-class norms of civility and penalizes marginalized voices for unruly and resistant speech. This paper critiques the prevailing ‘pathological’ approach to moderation that prioritizes sanitization over justice. Drawing on Marxist-feminist ethics, this paper advances three theses for the future of context-aware algorithmic moderation: (1) prioritizing participatory parity over civility, (2) incorporating identity- and context-aware analysis of speech; and (3) replacing purely numerical evaluations with justice-oriented, community-sensitive metrics. While acknowledging the structural limitations posed by platform capitalism, this paper positions the proposed framework as both critique and provocation, guiding regulatory reform, civil advocacy, and visions for mission-driven online content moderation serving digital commons
American abortion culture wars as religious populism : "truth" and "fight for truth" as floating signifiers
No full textThis paper explores the American abortion culture wars through the lens of religious populism, focusing on online discourse of the Christian pro-life confederation, Personhood Alliance. Drawing on Laclaudian post-foundationalist theories, the paper conceptualizes culture wars as a populist logic of meaning-making, where the floating signifier “truth” is central to mobilizing support and constructing Us-Them boundaries. The analysis identifies two key floating meanings of “truth”: restoring divine, cultural, and scientific truth about personhood, and battling the perceived conspiracies of the liberal abortion establishment. Hybrid media ecologies provide a controlled space for the movement to disseminate narratives circumventing platform moderation. The movement’s affective Us-Them construction portrays “Us” as righteous truth-seekers and saviours of the marginalized, while “Them” is cast as a corrupt liberal elite deceiving and exploiting the marginalised. This affective dichotomy expands abortion culture wars beyond the Christian pro-life base, inviting marginalized groups to join the fight against the establishment
American Abortion Culture Wars as Religious Populism : “Truth” and “Fight for Truth” as Floating Signifiers
No full textThis paper explores the American abortion culture wars through the lens of religious populism, focusing on online discourse of the Christian pro-life confederation, Personhood Alliance. Drawing on Laclaudian post-foundationalist theories, the paper conceptualizes culture wars as a populist logic of meaning-making, where the floating signifier "truth" is central to mobilizing support and constructing Us-Them boundaries. The analysis identifies two key floating meanings of "truth": restoring divine, cultural, and scientific truth about personhood, and battling the perceived conspiracies of the liberal abortion establishment. Hybrid media ecologies provide a controlled space for the movement to disseminate narratives circumventing platform moderation. The movement's affective Us-Them construction portrays "Us" as righteous truth-seekers and saviours of the marginalized, while "Them" is cast as a corrupt liberal elite deceiving and exploiting the marginalised. This affective dichotomy expands abortion culture wars beyond the Christian pro-life base, inviting marginalized groups to join the fight against the establishment.Peer reviewe
Rush hour of populists : religious populism and hybrid media
No full textThe introduction to the special issue develops a framework for understanding religious populism in hybrid media environments, emphasizing its role as a mode of meaning-making that intertwines political and religious logics. Moving beyond conventional approaches that frame religious populism as either the politicization of religion or the sacralization of politics, we highlight its capacity to shape collective identities through transcendencies—the drive to move beyond immediate experience and construct systems of significance. We argue that religious populism extends beyond institutional structures, functioning as a culturally embedded process that reinterprets and reclaims meaning-making in contemporary society. Within hybrid media environments, where digital and traditional platforms intersect, these dynamics are intensified through algorithmic visibility, direct engagement, and the erosion of institutional religious gatekeeping. By situating religious populism within broader media and cultural transformations, this introduction underscores its influence in contemporary political and religious landscapes
Incivility and intolerance on Twitter: A case study of political tweets about abortion in Ireland (2018) and the United States (2020)
No full textIn recent years, technology-scepticist views caution that internet technologies are far from utopian places or idealisations of Habermasian public spheres. There are growing concerns about the proliferation of harmful content online, including online hate speech, harassment, abuse, etc. In this thesis, I focus on one of the most concerning and harmful behaviours on Twitter and in politics more broadly: political incivility and intolerance, through a case study of political tweets about abortion in Ireland (2018) and the United States (2020).
The thesis aims to enhance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of political incivility and intolerance in abortion discourse and on Twitter. I make three main contributions to research on these topics. First, I make a critical-normative contribution by discussing online incivility and intolerance in connection with deliberative and critical theorists, including Jürgen Habermas’ theories of public spheres, deliberation, and civility as well as Rainer Forst’s theories of pluralism and toleration. My thesis establishes a concrete normative vision of what democratic communications ought to be. Furthermore, this normative discussion compensates for the limitations of computer science-driven content regulations, which lack theoretical underpinnings in terms of what they mean by ‘toxic,’ ‘harmful,’ or ‘uncivil’ language in their models. Following Habermas’ and Forst’s theories, I argue that incivility can have some limited roles in deliberation whereas intolerance is incompatible with fundamental principles of deliberative and pluralist democracy.
Secondly, I make an empirical-descriptive contribution to research, exploring the Irish and U.S. Twitter data both quantitatively and qualitatively. To study the topic from multiple perspectives, I employ an innovative methodological triangulation, combining computational text mining methods and manual qualitative text analysis. Quantitative big data analysis produces a general linear model to predict the relationships between incivility, intolerance, and diverse demographic, political, and communicative contexts, e.g. high-profile political events and issues, abortion issue position, issue partisanship, gender, anonymity, tweeting context. The qualitative analysis explores rhetorical patterns and types of political incivility and intolerance, unfolding how Twitter users employ political incivility and intolerance, and what assumptions and ideologies are embedded in them. The qualitative analysis reveals that Twitter users construct antagonism and false polarisation between ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’ sabotaging reasonable deliberation and policy compromises. The cross-country comparative analyses indicate that political incivility and intolerance are cross-cultural concepts but also unfold in culture-particular ways with specific talking points and vocabulary.
Thirdly, I discuss the prescriptive implications of my normative and empirical discussions and empirical findings for the health of deliberative politics, illuminating how we should understand incivility and intolerance and deal with them. I make five noteworthy observations for extensions and future scholarship: (1) there is a strong predictive relationship between political incivility and intolerance; (2) Twitter structures can hinder productive sublimation of anger to persuasive arguments; (3) a small set of hyper-active users dominate the uncivil and intolerant communications; (4) there is little relationship between anonymity, political incivility and intolerance; and (5) there is a link between political incivility, intolerance, and the rise of populism and reactionary backlash. I also make social impact recommendations concerning platform redesigns and civic education about online ethics.
Through these three original contributions, this PhD thesis not only benefits ongoing scholarly knowledge and debates on digital culture and online user behaviours, but also contributes to lasting social impacts such as paving the way for future projects on social media platform redesign, the development of ethical and principled content regulation algorithmic models, and civic ethics education for members of public who use social media for political and activist purposes.</p
DOES ALGORITHMIC CONTENT MODERATION RPOMOTE DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE? RADICAL DEMOCRATIC CRITIQUE OF TOXIC LANGUAGE AI
No full textAlgorithmic content moderation is becoming a common practice employed by many social media platforms to regulate ‘toxic’ language and to promote democratic public conversations. This paper provides a normative critique of politically liberal assumption of civility embedded in algorithmic moderation, illustrated by Google’s Perspective API. From a radical democratic standpoint, this paper normatively and empirically distinguishes between incivility and intolerance because they have different implications for democratic discourse. The paper recognises the potential political, expressive, and symbolic values of incivility, especially for the socially marginalised. We, therefore, argue against regulation of incivility using AI. There are, however, good reasons to regulate hate speech but it is incumbent upon the users of AI moderation to show that this can be done reliably. The paper emphasises the importance of detecting diverse forms of hate speech that convey intolerant and exclusionary ideas without using explicitly hateful or extremely emotional wording. The paper then empirically evaluates the performance of the current algorithmic moderation to see whether it can discern incivility and intolerance and whether it can detect diverse forms of intolerance. Empirical findings reveal that the current algorithmic moderation does not promote democratic discourse, but rather deters it by silencing the uncivil but pro-democratic voices of the marginalised as well as by failing to detect intolerant messages whose meanings are embedded in nuances and rhetoric. New algorithmic moderation should focus on the reliable and transparent identification of hate speech and be in line with the feminist, anti-racist, and critical theories of democratic discourse
The UK : Brexit and competing populism
No full textThe chapter discusses the political context and political communication environment in the UK during the 2019 EP election. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in the UK’s political communication and populism in the party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focuses on 7296 tweets sent from 966 Twitter accounts by various political actors in May 2019. The 2019 election was the UK’s last participation in the EP elections before the country left the EU following the 2016 Brexit referendum. As the two major political parties, Conservatives and Labour, refrained from the 2019 EP election debates, smaller Europhilic parties (e.g., Liberal Democrats, Change UK, SNP, Green, Cymru) and Eurosceptic parties (e.g., UKIP, Brexit Party) dominated the Twittersphere. Brexit and the EU were popular themes in the British tweets alongside tweets encouraging supporters to vote and attacking rival political parties. Topic modelling shows differences in the debates on the EU, Brexit, the populist construction of ‘the people’ and media, as well as economic and environmental issues between regions and across the Europhilic and Eurosceptic parties. Network analysis demonstrates that the British Twittersphere was clustered into two antagonistic camps divided by their stance on Brexit. In this, the UK represented a clear case of competing populism
Rush Hour of Populists : Religious Populism and Hybrid Media
No full textThe introduction to the special issue develops a framework for understanding religious populism in hybrid media environments, emphasizing its role as a mode of meaning-making that intertwines political and religious logics. Moving beyond conventional approaches that frame religious populism as either the politicization of religion or the sacralization of politics, we highlight its capacity to shape collective identities through transcendencies - the drive to move beyond immediate experience and construct systems of significance. We argue that religious populism extends beyond institutional structures, functioning as a culturally embedded process that reinterprets and reclaims meaning-making in contemporary society. Within hybrid media environments, where digital and traditional platforms intersect, these dynamics are intensified through algorithmic visibility, direct engagement, and the erosion of institutional religious gatekeeping. By situating religious populism within broader media and cultural transformations, this introduction underscores its influence in contemporary political and religious landscapes.Non peer reviewe
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