A Cross-Platform Approach to the Study of Public Opinion Expression

The next session at ECREA 2024 is a panel on the study of public opinion expressions, organised by the Opinion Network initiative. We start with Dimitra Milioni, discussing the study of opinion expression in a comparative cross-platform perspective across social media platforms. This focusses on the interplay between user practices and digital architectures, as viewed from a sociotechnical perspective.

Elements of this might include the way that pseudonymity or anonymity settings influence politeness and civility in commenting; the way that similarities between commenter identities on social media as compared to mainstream media discussion fora affect discussion processes; or the way that communicative structures and affordances on different platforms influence the dynamics of political polarisation or depolarisation over time.

Such analyses need to consider several aspects, including especially network structures; functionalities (of the platform, but also of the personal hardware used to access the platform); algorithmic filtering and other interventions; and the datafication of actions by and upon users. These aspects are differently structured across different platforms, and they are also in constant flux.

Comparisons between the activities of the same users on different platforms might be especially insightful here; the project will explore this for instance for MPs who are active across Facebook, Xitter, and LinkedIn. Consistent data gathering across even these fairly mainstream platforms is difficult, however. A first question is to what extent posts are identical, nearly identical, or notably different across these platforms; how different personal or political topics are being addressed, audiovisual content is included, negativity or positivity are deployed in posts, etc.