In recent years, technology-scepticist views have cautioned that the internet is far from a utopian place or an idealisation of Habermasian public spheres (Habermas, 1996, 2006). There are growing concerns about the proliferation of harmful content online, including hate speech and abuse. In this thesis, I focus on one of the 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 and the United States.
Three analytic chapters in my thesis investigate different dimensions of the social phenomenon, using methodological triangulation (Olsen, 2004). In the first analytic chapter, I examine incivility and intolerance in the Twittersphere using computational social science methods. I build regression modelling of uncivil and intolerant Twittersphere, analysing a relationship between incivility, intolerance and demographic, contextual and political variables such as Twitter users’ political position, issue partisanship, gender, anonymity and Twitter affordances. Using big data from Twitter communication discussing abortion issues in Ireland (2018) and the United States (2020) and relying on lexicon-based automatic classification, my thesis offers new insights about the volume and dynamics of Twitter incivility and intolerance. I show that the Irish and U.S. Twittersphere are largely civil and tolerant despite my choice of a highly emotive and polarised topic, abortion discourse. The pro-life position is strongly associated with intolerance, and a small set of users with strong issue partisanship are found to dominate most of the uncivil and intolerant communication on Twitter. The network of tweets built through retweets and quotes is more likely to contain incivility and intolerance. Despite being conceptually separate, incivility and intolerance are also strong predictors of each other. Lastly, gender and anonymity do not have significant positive relationships with incivility or intolerance.
The second analytic chapter explores rhetorical patterns and types of incivility. This rhetorical analysis of incivility shows that incivility can serve some positive functions for vibrant public spheres and deliberative politics. I also identify some rhetorically ambiguous functions of incivility which make it difficult to discern what is acceptable and not in online political discussion contexts. Echoing previous scholarly discussions (Masullo Chen et al., 2019; Rossini, 2020), this rhetorical analysis argues against a general ban on incivility because such regulation can unfairly silence the type of public engagements that are uncivil, rude, aggressive in tone but still reasonable and legitimate political participation. To make online spaces a Habermasian public sphere, it is crucial to promote online ethics education and argument rather than harsher content regulation.
The final analytic chapter explores the rhetorical patterns and types of intolerance. This rhetorical analysis of intolerance unpacks the discursive construction of antagonism and political tribalism that violates the reciprocal and general respect between citizens (Forst, 2003, 2008). This qualitative analysis identifies the main loci of discursive antagonism and polarisation that can be ‘interrupted’ and ‘destabilise’ (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1996) to bridge the gap between pro-life and pro-choice sides and to build a path for more reasonable, constructive deliberations for common ground and compromise.
Throughout this PhD, I aim to make three original contributions. First, I make a critical-normative contribution by discussing online incivility and intolerance in connection with critical theories such as Habermas' and Forst’s. Second, I make an empirical-descriptive contribution through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of Twitter communication. Thirdly, I discuss the prescriptive implications of my findings for the health of online public spheres and constructive deliberation. I am currently working on three journal articles based on the three analytic chapters and normative discussions. My goal is to benefit ongoing scholarly knowledge and debates on online incivility, intolerance, content regulation and civic education and to promote online ethics and productive deliberative politics.
References
Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms (W. Rehg, Trans.). The MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (2006). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research. Communication theory, 16 (4), 411–426.
Forst, R. (2003). Toleration, justice and reason. In C. McKinnon & D. Castiglione (Eds.), The culture of toleration in diverse societies. Manchester University Press, 71-85.
Forst, R. (2008). The limits of toleration. In I. Creppell, R. Hardin, & S. Macedo (Eds.), Toleration on trial. Lexington Books, 17–30.
Kitzinger, C., & Wilkinson, S. (1996). Theorizing representing the other. Representing the other: A feminism and psychology reader, 1-32.
Masullo Chen, G., Muddiman, A., Wilner, T., Pariser, E., & Stroud, N. J. (2019). We should not get rid of incivility online. Social Media+ Society, 5(3), 2056305119862641.
Olsen, W. (2004). Triangulation in social research: qualitative and quantitative methods can really be mixed. Developments in sociology, 20, 103–118.
Rossini, P. (2020). Beyond incivility: Understanding patterns of uncivil and intolerant discourse in online political talk. Communication Research, 0093650220921314.