The Impact of Right-Wing Populism on Deliberative Quality on Facebook

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 news organisations, by examining whether the presence of right-wing populist views in the first comment results in a greater incidence of further comments with low deliberative qualities.

The project examined this against the context of the 2015 refugee crisis, for the Facebook pages of highly popular news media in Austria and Slovenia. A large-scale automated content analysis examined how the presence of right-wing populist views in original comments affected the volume of further engagement, and found that anti-immigrant and populist content produced a significantly greater number of responses.

Further, an analysis of these responses showed that people-centrism in the original comments reduced the presence of arguments in follow-on comments; anti-immigration views in the original comments also increased incivility in subsequent comments; while attempts to counter populist views were often followed by a greater number of impolite comments. Populist and anti-immigrant comments thus spark further discussion and comments, but they deteriorate the deliberative quality of that discussion. This raises new questions for content moderation practices, too.