Oh et al 2021 - Unpacking uncivil society.pdf (502.66 kB)
Download fileUnpacking uncivil society: incivility and intolerance in the 2018 Irish abortion referendum discussions on Twitter
journal contribution
posted on 2021-03-10, 11:37 authored by Dayei Oh, Suzanne Elayan, Martin SykoraMartin Sykora, John DowneyJohn DowneyIn the era of rising populist sentiment, deep social and political polarisations, and a growing crisis of online harms, numerous scholars share concern about the impact of such uncivil populist forces on the health of liberal democracy. This article argues that we should first normatively distinguish between incivility and intolerance. We contend that the core problem of uncivil society is intolerance, not incivility. We then empirically analyse incivility and intolerance during the 2018 Irish abortion referendum and its discussions on Twitter by conducting a content analysis and qualitative textual analysis of 3,000 tweets posted between April and June 2018. The results show that despite selecting a highly emotive and polarised issue, incivility and intolerance do not dominate the Twittersphere. Furthermore, gender and political position of users were found to be associated with use of incivility and intolerance, which increased as the referendum approached.
History
School
- Business and Economics
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Business
- Communication and Media
- Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Nordicom ReviewVolume
42Issue
s1Pages
103 - 118Publisher
Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research (Nordicom)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Nordicom and authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2021-03-03Copyright date
2021ISSN
1403-1108eISSN
2001-5119Publisher version
Language
- en