Abstract
This paper shows that online political discussion networks are, on average, wider and deeper than the networks generated by other types of discussions: they engage a larger number of participants and cascade through more levels of nested comments. Using data collected from the Slashdot forum, this paper reconstructs the discussion threads as hierarchical networks and proposes a model for their comparison and classification. In addition to the substantive topic of discussion, which corresponds to the different sections of the forum (such as Developers, Games, or Politics), we classify the threads according to structural features like the maximum number of comments at any level of the network (i.e. the width) and the number of nested layers in the network (i.e. the depth). We find that political discussion networks display a tendency to cluster around the area that corresponds to wider and deeper structures, showing a significant departure from the structure exhibited by other types of discussions. We propose using this model to create a framework that allows the analysis and comparison of different internet technologies for the promotion of political deliberation.
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Notes
Post-processing caused by the presence of duplicated comments was necessary due to an error of representation on the website. This explains discrepancies in the total number of comments according to our study and to the Slashdot figures for certain posts.
The maximum depth for political discussions has been offset by a small amount in order to avoid overlap with the non-political posts.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially funded by the Càtedra Telefónica de Producció Multimèdia and by the Ramon y Cajal program funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science; it has also benefited from the R+D project SEJ2006-00959/SOCI. We are grateful to the attendants of the Nuffield-OII Networks seminar and the OII-Berkman Center workshop on Internet and Democracy for their comments to previous versions of this paper, and to Bernie Hogan for his helpful suggestions. We are also indebted to three anonymous reviewers for their advice.
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Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Kaltenbrunner, A. & Banchs, R. The structure of political discussion networks: a model for the analysis of online deliberation. J Inf Technol 25, 230–243 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2010.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2010.2