Characterizing Disagreement in Online Political Talk: Examining Incivility and Opinion Expression on News Websites and Facebook in Brazil

Abstract

This paper examines the ways people engage in political conversation triggered by exposure to political news in two different informal platforms in Brazil: Facebook and news websites. We analyze the extent to which disagreement is associated to discursive traits that are commonly associated with deliberative behavior, such as directly engaging with others, and trying to justify one’s views, and negative traits, such as incivility. The contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows. First, this paper emphasizes the importance of looking beyond a single platform and a single topic to understand political discussion online. Second, we demonstrate that online disagreement is positively associated with both deliberative traits, such as justified opinion expression, and non-deliberative traits, such as incivility, and argue that the latter is not enough to dismiss the value of political talk. We also demonstrate that the topic of a news story is relevant both to drive political conversation and to spark political disagreement: controversies involving celebrities and stories covering international affairs are more likely to drive heterogeneous conversations than more conventional political topics (e.g. government, policy), even though these are the topics that tend to attract more political talk. Finally, this study contributes to fill an important gap in the literature, looking beyond the US and Western European contexts by examining political talk in Brazil, the fourth largest digital market in the world.