The final presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Daniel Thiele, whose focus is on right-wing populist communication. This is highly visible in social media spaces and in the comments sections of news sites, and may both harm democratic debate or revitalise political engagement. The concrete question tackled by this paper, then, is how such right-wing populist content is affecting the deliberative quality of comments on Facebook.
Deliberation can be assessed against five key aspects: reciprocity, argumentation, sourcing, politeness, and civility. The study used this framework to explore the Facebook responses to original comments on the Facebook pages of …