CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Juncosa Calahorrano, Maria Gabriela |
|---|---|
| Title | Uncovering the Spiral of Silence in online political deliberation |
| Summary | This study explores the intersection of digital media, social behavior, and political expression, focusing on the dynamics of opinion expression in online environments. The widespread use of social media platforms, such as YouTube, has transformed public communication by enabling global connectivity and fostering political engagement. However, this increased connectivity also introduces risks, including the spread of misinformation, polarization, and the suppression of diverse viewpoints, issues that are central to theories like the Spiral of Silence. This research employs complementary methodologies—data analysis of social media and online social experiments—to investigate how digital media facilitates or hinders political expression. First, having built a dataset of approximately 32.5 million comments and replies from videos posted by six prominent US news outlets on YouTube, we study toxic and insulting behavior in user interactions and its impact on conversation flow and disengagement. We find that toxic and insulting comments are widespread in online political discussions, especially during politically charged periods. Toxic top-level comments often trigger similarly negative replies, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of escalating toxicity. Finally, we identify a latent state tied to disengagement, where users become less active but more likely to post toxic content, enabling antisocial behaviors to thrive. To complement these findings, we designed two online experiments. In the first experiment, participants collaboratively evaluated political content under conditions of overt or covert political affiliations. Results reveal that collaboration improves the quality of fact-checking, but overt political affiliations reduce the quality of outputs, underscoring the benefits of anonymity in collaborative settings and suggests that the anticipation of conflict may lead individuals to conceal their political views, consistent with the Spiral of Silence theory. The second experiment explicitly examines the Spiral of Silence theory, which posits that fear of social isolation and perceptions of majority opinion influence individuals' willingness to express opinions. Although we did not find a significant relationship between fear of isolation and the willingness to share opinions, other results support key aspects of the Spiral of Silence theory. Specifically, individuals with high communication apprehension were less likely to participate in controversial discussions, while those with high attitude certainty and those who considered an issue highly important were more likely to express their opinions. Furthermore, our results indicate that individuals rely heavily on their perceptions when deciding whether to express their political opinions. Our study demonstrates that self-censorship in toxic environments plays a pivotal role in shaping political discourse by discouraging participation. Through empirical evidence supporting the Spiral of Silence theory and combining theoretical, experimental, and observational methods, we uncover the complexities of online political conversations. This work emphasizes the need to account for self-censorship dynamics, offering insights into the interplay between individual behavior and collective dynamics to foster healthier, more inclusive digital discourse. |
| Supervisor | Iñiguez, Gerardo; Peixoto, Tiago |
| Department | Network Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/juncosa_maria.pdf |
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