Meeting Summary: Large scale, online discussions are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary society. Arguably, they have also become one of the most significant new forces in the shaping of public opinion. Many have been concerned that these new spheres of public discourse bear some responsibility for the well-documented rise of political polarization and cross-group antipathy.
To date, however, a systematic understanding of how different online discussion platforms capture the shape of existing opinion spaces or potentially influences their constitution remains to be developed. This project endeavors to begin addressing this gap by theorizing and empirically investigating how three different platforms affect the way online discussions are generated from, and potentially reshape, the latent opinion space of their participants.
Participants
N. Gizem Bacaksizlar, Santa Fe Institute
Lynette Shaw, University of Washington at Seattle
Marco Pangallo, University of Oxford
Graham Heimberg