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The Design of Online Environments (Political Hashtags) and the Quality of Democratic Discourse At-Scale
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Abstract:
Facilitating democratic discourse, or people's ability to access factual information in service of thoughtful discussion of social issues, is critical for democracies to function properly. However, with the rise of online fake news, misinformation, and political extremism, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have civil conversations on the internet. As a first step to addressing this issue, scholars need to understand how the current design of online environments shapes people’s ability to respectfully engage across social and political differences. In this dissertation, I investigate how common social media design features, such as hashtags directly impact the quality of democratic discourse at-scale. Using natural language processing, statistics, and experimental design, I empirically demonstrate how linguistic behavior and the presence of political hashtags in online social media news articles impact the quality of discussions surrounding race, gender, and equality. Through my findings, I provide a theoretical examination of functionality and intertextuality as critical aspects of online design. Online design considerations that consider functionality alone tend to promote a digital public sphere that predominantly favors hashtag (or content) producers over non-users and passive content consumers. The sole emphasis on the functionality of design features drives frequency-driven research practices that prioritize discourse conditions for hashtag producers through volume-based definitions of discussion quality. Collectively, the research studies in this thesis are motivated by a desire to understand how online spaces can be better designed to foster interaction and discourse that can bridge rather than sharpen social differences. Results from this dissertation research strongly indicate that scholars, designers, and engineers need to rethink and evaluate how current methodological approaches that prioritize the functionality of online design choices are limiting the way we understand the quality of democratic discourse on the internet. As a step towards this direction, I evoke Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality to demonstrate how online design choices facilitate the power of language in which important social topics are discussed across networks.
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Keyword:
Communication; computational linguistics; Computer science; democratic discourse; hashtags; natural language processing (NLP); political discourse; Political science; social media
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URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4st7v3f0
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NLP Applied to Online Suicide Intention Detection
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In: HealTAC 2020 ; https://www.hal.inserm.fr/inserm-02521389 ; HealTAC 2020, Mar 2020, London, France (2020)
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Medium‐term evolution in French national newspaper coverage of the interrelations between biodiversity and agriculture
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In: ISSN: 2578-4854 ; Conservation Science and Practice ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02995276 ; Conservation Science and Practice, 2020, ⟨10.1111/csp2.140⟩ (2020)
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Islamophobie : du mot au phénomène social. Approche cooccurrentielle d'une notion controversée
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In: JADTs (15esJournées internationales d’Analyse statistique des Données Textuelles) ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03167194 ; JADTs (15esJournées internationales d’Analyse statistique des Données Textuelles), Jun 2020, Toulouse, France (2020)
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Implementing Eco’s Model Reader with WordEmbeddings. An Experiment on Facebook Ideological Bots
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In: JADT - Journées d'analyse des données textuelles ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03144105 ; JADT - Journées d'analyse des données textuelles, Jun 2020, Toulouse, France (2020)
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"Irgendwie bin ich immer am Schreiben" : vom Sinn transdisziplinärer Analysen der Textproduktion im Medienwandel [Online resource]
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In: Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics 2 (2020) 1, 14-47
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„oh isch FIND_s nich;“ : eine konversationsanalytische Untersuchung sprachlicher Bezugnahmen auf smartphone-gestützte Suchprozesse in Alltagsgesprächen [Online resource]
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In: Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics 2 (2020) 2, 90-122
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[Rezension zu:] Burwitz-Melzer, Eva/Riemer, Claudia/Schmelter, Lars (2019) (Hg.): Das Lehren und Lernen von Fremd- und Zweitsprachen im digitalen Wandel. Arbeitspapiere der 39. Frühjahrskonferenz zur Erforschung des Fremdsprachenunterrichts. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto (Gießener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik). 313 Seiten. 68,00 € ISBN: 978-3-8233-8325-3 [Online resource]
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In: Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics 3 (2020) 1, 1-6
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Smartphone-based language practices among refugees: mediational repertoires in two families [Online resource]
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In: Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics 2 (2020) 2, 60-89
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[Rezension] Schneider, Roman(2019): Mehrfach annotierte Textkorpora. Strukturierte Speicherung und Abfrage. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto (Korpuslinguistik und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Sprache, Band 8). 315 Seiten. € 98,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-8286-7 [Online resource]
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In: Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics 3 (2020) 1, 7-13
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