Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• Facebook
• social networking sites
• politics
• homophily

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dominik Batorski is a research professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling, University of Warsaw. He received his PhD in sociology in 2004. His main areas of interests include social and economic determinants and consequences of the use of ICTs. He is also exploring structural dynamics of large social networks, as well as processes of the diffusion of information and innovation on those networks [email: [email protected]].

Ilona Grzywińska is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at Warsaw University. Her research focuses on online public sphere and political communication and social media. She participated in prestigious academic programs, including Fullbright Junior Advanced Research Program and Oxford Summer Doctoral Program [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Dominik Batorski http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1112-7114

Ilona Grzywińska http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3162-4214

Notes

1 Its leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke left the party in 2015 and started a new one, KORWiN, together with some politicians from other smaller right-wing parties.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [grant number 2012/05/B/HS6/03802].