Political discussions in online oppositional communities in the non-democratic context

Abstract

Taking into account YouTube’s specific role in the Russian media system and the increasing level of political polarization in the country, this study examines the role of incivility in discussions and whether discussions in an anti-government community represent a place for disagreement between pro-opposition and pro-government users. I argue that an online environment helps these sides meet each other rather than creating echo chambers of like-minded users. Moreover, in the quite restrictive Russian context for political deliberation, the incivility of messages plays a role in further involving commenters in discussions. Using the corpus of comments posted in the discussion section of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s YouTube channel, I exploited class affinity modeling to identify pro-government and pro-opposition stances. Incivility was studied based on Google’s Perspective API toxicity classifier. I found that users avoid extreme forms of incivility when interacting with other commenters, but uncivil comments are more likely to start discussion threads. Furthermore, the level of incivility in comments gets higher over time after a video release. Pro-government sentiments, on the one hand, are associated with a subsequent response from Navalny’s supporters to the out-group criticism and, on the other hand, contribute to the further formation of hubs with a pro-government narrative. This research contributes to the extant literature on affective polarization on social media, shedding light on political discussions within an oppositional community in a non-democracy.