Politics on Facebook: Deliberation and the Club Model

Researchers look at Social Network Sites (hereafter SNSs ) within the context of politics and generally fall into either the skeptical or optimist camp in terms of the impact of SNSs on political activities. Most scholars reached these conclusions by looking at overtly political pages or specific elections. Rather than trying to grasp politics on SNSs by concentrating on a specific political website, election or social movement we first need to look at the type of political talk that is taking place on SNSs including the seemingly non-political venues on the SNSs. This paper scrutinizes top 50 most popular public Facebook pages from Turkey to see how political talk occurs both in a political and non-political setting. It is based on a content analysis of roughly 100.000 comments in public Facebook pages by focusing on whether deliberation is encouraged or not. The data is collected by a random selection of five days between September and December 2012. The issue of deliberation is approached in a broader sense since political talk rarely takes place in such a sterile formal environment with idealized rationality and civility on the part of the participants. I argue that when political discussions take place there is very little room for deliberation and only in very specific contexts. These specific contexts have a lot to do with the way in which in-group solidarity is perceived and the degree to which affiliations allow differences of political perspectives. A brief comparison with the most popular Facebook pages among the users from Germany and the USA will be made to highlight the role of the national and group contexts.