Brevity is the Soul of Twitter: The Constraint Affordance and Political Discussion

Abstract

Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a tweet in November 2017, which provided an opportunity to study the effect of technological affordances on political discussions using a discontinuous time series design. Using supervised and unsupervised natural language processing methods, we analyzed 358,242 tweet replies to U.S. politicians from January 2017 to March 2018. We show that doubling the permissible length of a tweet led to less uncivil, more polite, and more constructive discussions online. However, the declining trend in the empathy and respectfulness of these tweets raises concerns about the implications of the changing norms for the quality of political deliberation.

Causal effects of affordance change on communication behavior: Empirical evidence from organizational and leadership social media use

“…Twitter, notorious for its restriction on text length, suddenly changed its character limit from 140 to 280 on November 7, 2017, which provided a great opportunity for causal identi cation on the e ect of a ordance change on communication behavior. Supplementing recent case studies on the event (e.g., Gligorić, Anderson, & West, 2018Jaidka, Zhou, & Lelkes, 2019), we report statistical details on how the switch induces changes in content creation and underline the role of platform a ordances in shaping user behavior in the digital world. Analyzing the exogenous intervention with an instrumental variable (IV) approach and using organizational settings (i.e., top organizations and leadership Twitter accounts) as the research context, we show how the change in a ordances leads to various degrees of change in social media use, i.e., the use of language and interactive features on Twitter.…”

“…Some scholars tried to establish the causality using lab experiments, but many of them are comparative in nature and lack external validity (e.g., Oz et al, 2018). A few studies have taken advantage of a public event of a ordance change -Twitter increasing its character limit from 140 to 280 -and provided some evidence on the link between a ordances and communication in terms of engagement outcomes and linguistics (Gligorić et al, 2018(Gligorić et al, , 2019(Gligorić et al, , 2020Jaidka et al, 2019). The current study contributed to this growing trend of quantitative analyses of a ordance theory by examining the same case but focusing on the explicit change of communication behavior, such as the use of interactive features and the compliance of treatment.…”

Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media Services

“…Similarly, previous content visible can prime how participants engage in political discussion [99]. Furthermore, political scientists have highlighted how platform designs, such as advertising and affordances, may have positive or negative effects on political discussions [17,48,65].…”

Modelo de consultoría digital en la comunicación social con el sistema empresarial productivo

“…La limitación de conocimientos precisos y exactos en modelos de plataformas digitales para la orientación al sector empresarial y luego, establecer un programa de monitoreo de los resultados es una prioridad (Salo, 2017;Jaidka et al, 2019;Gligori´c et al, 2019), pero debe entenderse que, en toda interacción social, la CD necesita modificarse o al menos, implementarse y uno de los servicios que puede ser relevante consiste en las consultorías.…”