Abstract
The article focuses on the online communication on Polish Facebook and Twitter around issues related to mortgage loans in Swiss francs. Based on 20k posts retrieved from both Facebook and Twitter, we found the most active actors and the most common topics appearing on those micro-public spheres. It was revealed that actors with institutional affiliation and those who are not affiliated discuss different problems and share dissimilar content related to Swiss franc debts. It was also found that certain categories of actors may influence online discussions on both social networking sites by promoting specific content in order to pursue their institutional interests. Finally, the diversity of topics and problems discussed by the two categories of actors identified on Facebook and Twitter suggest that Swiss franc mortgage holders are a good example of “connective action” with no clear identity or community traits that led to favourable judgment of the European Court of Justice.
Highlights
The article focuses on the online communication on Polish Facebook and Twitter around issues related to mortgage loans in Swiss francs
A comparison of 100 the most active actors on Facebook and Twitter revealed that only five of them were active on both social networking sites
We were able to identify an institutional affiliation for 70% of Facebook and 36% of Twitter’s 100 most active users
Summary
The article focuses on the online communication on Polish Facebook and Twitter around issues related to mortgage loans in Swiss francs. Optimists suggest that social media has become a new deliberative space (Habermas, 1962) for citizens, governments and companies to discuss and adjudicate (Benkler, 2004; Boyd, 2010) socially compelling problems Platforms such as Facebook or Twitter may serve as public spheres (counterpublics) coalesced around common concerns that may expose and enhance citizens’ voices (Batorski & Grzywińska, 2017; Fuchs, 2014; Lindgren & Cocq, 2017). Such event-related or interest-based communities focused on specific issues may be a good source of information and knowledge for people seeking expertise, advice, or support on social media. This structural weakness of information (capitalist) media has been formerly discussed by Habermas (1991, p. 171) and more recently by Fuchs (2013, 2014), who focused on social media landscape
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