Purpose Political polarization and incivility manifested itself online throughout the 2016 US presidential election. The purpose of this paper is to understand how features of social media platforms (e.g. reacting, sharing) impacted the online public sphere during the 2016 election. Design/methodology/approach After conducting in-depth interviews with politically interested young people and applying deductive coding procedures to transcripts of the interviews, Dahlberg’s (2004) six normative conditions for the public sphere were used to empirically examine this interview data. Findings While some participants described strategies for productive political discussion on Social Networking Sites (SNS) and a willingness to use them to discuss politics, many users’ experiences largely fall short of Dahlberg’s (2004) normative criteria for the public sphere. Research limitations/implications The period in which these interviews were conducted in could have contributed to a more pessimistic view of political discussion in general. Practical implications Scholars and the public should recognize that the affordances of SNS for political discussion are not distributed evenly between different platforms, both for the sake of empirical studies of SNS moving forward and the state of democratic deliberation. Originality/value Although previous research has examined online and SNS-based political discussion as it relates to the public sphere, few attempts have been made understand how specific communicative practices or platform-specific features of SNS have contributed to or detracted from a healthy public sphere.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no vaccine to cure or slow its impact due to the novelty of the virus, nor were there were any other standardized measures to handle its spread. Yet, despite the detrimental consequences of the pandemic and its impact on people’s lives, the behavior of individuals to combat the pandemic was not necessarily consistent with official guidelines. To make things worse, the pandemic was highly politicized in countries such as the U.S. With a help of a national survey from the U.S., we examine the associations between media literacy variables and willingness to perform recommended COVID-19 related health behavior. Moreover, we also examine the moderating role of conservative media use in this relationship. Our findings show that conservative media use was negatively associated with these protective behaviors, and that both media literacy variables were positively related with willingness to perform recommended COVID-19 related health behavior. Our results show that media literacy can mitigate some of the impact of conservative media use on individuals. Our findings help understand the complexity of protective behavior against the virus during a highly politicized pandemic.

While many Americans support the right to protest, increased animus has recently been directed at protesters themselves, often along partisan ideological lines and in partisan media content. However, there is a lack of research on attitudes toward treatment of protesters in the context of political violence and selective exposure to likeminded partisan sources of information. This study finds that a significant, positive relationship exists between self-identified Republicans and thinking that disruptive protesters deserve to be “roughed up,” while identifying as a Democrat produced a negative relationship in the same circumstance. Likewise, consumption of conservative partisan media was found to have a positive relationship with the idea of “roughing up” disruptive protesters, while liberal partisan media was found to have a negative relationship. However, selective exposure to attitude-affirming media only had a significant impact among self-identified Democrats, in the sense that Democrats’ selective exposure to left-leaning media was associated with less support for “roughing up” disruptive protesters.

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