Incivility Balanced? Civil vs. Uncivil Speech in Online Political Discussions as Dependent on Political Parallelism

Abstract

This paper explores the balance between civility and incivility in Russian online political discussions in their relation to platform-based political parallelism. So far, the deliberative quality of communication on online forums and social networks has been seen as dependent on discussion structure, contextual factors, user traits and intentions, and textual features of the discussions, especially negative ones like incivility. However, of the latter, interdependence of (in)civility patterns and political parallelism of media where the discussions take place have not been explored well. Moreover, while incivility is studied extensively, its balancing practice, namely explicit civility and respect, usually escapes scholarly attention. In Russia, political discussions, media, and even platforms demonstrate strong political polarization, forming a peculiar picture of political parallelism. Polarization fuels political hostility that may have civil and uncivil patterns influencing the way of networked talk. To explore to what extent political positioning of the discussion milieus, e.g., media / media accounts where discussions take place, alters the volume and the nature of political (in)civility, we explore two cases, the first used as a baseline one and the second as the target one. For this, we use discourse analysis and descriptive statistics to show that incivility in the Russian-language online discussions is partly compensated by explicit civility, while remaining dominant in the fabric of political discussions. Moreover, we show the difference in the volume and nature of (in)civility within the comment sections of oppositional and pro-state media. Our results suggest hint to the ‘free speech vs. hate speech’ dilemma, as the comments in the oppositional media appear to be more hostile, while those on the pro-state accounts look less polluted by aggression.