Quality of Democratic Discourse in the Age of Political Hashtags and Social Media News Consumption

Whether through television, newspapers, or more increasingly through Social Networking Sites (SNS), journalistic coverage of current events have long played a significant role in mediating knowledge and information to the public. The platforms and channels through which news is produced and consumed shape how the public talk about current issues, exemplifying the critical link between democratic discourse and the press. However, with the advent of social media, the display of online news content has increasingly changed over the years. This implies that the conditions and avenues through which audiences make sense of mediated politics through news have possibly changed as well. This is the premise that motivates my work. In my dissertation, I examine how social media news consumption impacts the viability of online political deliberation around news content. Specifically, I investigate how civil discourse is shaped in relation to political hashtags in the headlines and texts of social media news posts. I use both qualitative and computational (natural language processing) methods on publicly available social media news comments and survey data collected through large-scale experiments.