Discussing Politics on Facebook: Club Model and Rowdy Deliberative Talk

Scholars who study deliberative democracy put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the way people talk about politics, which shapes their thoughts and practices. In online political settings people tend to talk about politics with like-minded individuals creating echo chambers. However, by focusing on overtly political venues, the literature understudies the political talk that takes place in non-political settings. In this paper I investigate the question of how we come across political discourse on a pre-dominantly non-political platform on social network sites (SNSs). Based on a mix-method analysis of over 80.000 comments from the 50 most popular public Facebook pages from Turkey, the findings suggest that we are more likely to find deliberative talk in non-political settings if politics is considered to be an appropriate discussion topic. They may also be unexpectedly rowdy, contrary to the most of the conceptualizations of deliberative talk.Master of Art