The Importance of Staying Silent on Social Media

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Liz Solverson, who asks why the majority might remain silent on social media, with a particular focus on why young adults remain silent on political topics on social media. Liz worked with focus groups of young adults, exploring how they used social media for political and general purposes, how they experienced their relationship to political expression, and what they understood as good citizenship.

General explanations for non-participation in political debate is a sense of low internal efficacy: people feeling that they have insufficient skills to express themselves. Additionally, they may fear critical responses or disagreement, and understand social media as inappropriate spaces for public debate. This is perhaps especially also due to context collapse, as many different areas of one’s life coalesce around one’s social media profiles. But further, young citizens may also simply not see public expression as an important part of their active citizenship; instead, they may seek out good-quality political messaging.

Liz’s study found that for young people online, silence is now seen as the norm: they are increasingly using social media as spectators, as spaces for gathering information and being entertained rather than for active participation. This is different for chat-based apps (like SnapChat), and for limited-audience spaces, however. But in public spaces online (which could be seen by their entire friends list or network), they would post only a handful of times per year, and would make sure that such content is of very high quality.

The same applies for explicitly political talk: these young people didn’t see political expression as the norm, and as an undertaking only for older people. They also felt that such activity would not align well with the interests of their established social networks. They also saw this as the realm only of more specialised contributors who made an effort to produce quality content, for instance on platforms like YouTube. Real political contributions were thus limited to a much smaller circle of contacts, mitigating the risk of context collapse and of having their views misunderstood by more distant relations.

So, overall, it is critical to see political communication in the context of wider norms on social media; most users take the role of the silent spectator most of the time, and not because of Spiral of Silence processes. Good citizenship might not simply mean active political expression, but also protecting the online space as a discursive commons where only those with a particular knowledge of the topic get to speak. Perhaps social media thus aren’t the participatory spaces we imagine them to be – this doesn’t mean that people aren’t engaging in meaningful ways, but that those actual forms of engagement are still undertheorised.