Full length articleAre people willing to share their political opinions on Facebook? Exploring roles of self-presentational concern in spiral of silence
Introduction
The expression of opinion on public issues is important for democracy, as it is not only critical for democratic discourse but also essential to facilitate political engagement (Valenzuela, Kim, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2012). Facebook has become a major platform for political self-disclosure and public discussion. According to a Pew survey conducted in 2016, 49% of American Facebook users post about politics on Facebook (Pew, 2016a). However, publicly expressing political and social opinion on Facebook can expose individuals to judgment and even criticism from their Facebook friends, contributing to the spiral of silence.
Originally developed to understand the formation of public opinions, the spiral of silence theory suggests that when it comes to public issues, especially morally-implicated issues, individuals tend to stay silent when holding minority views to avoid social isolation (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). Spiral of silence studies have conceptualized public opinions in terms of political discussion and decision making in a democracy (Noelle-Neuman, 1995). Mass communication research has extensively employed this theory to understand how people use traditional media to evaluate opinion climate (see Scheufele & Moy, 2000 for a review). As Facebook becomes an increasingly popular platform worldwide for voicing political opinions, it is critical to understand how this platform affects users’ willingness to speak out on controversial issues. Although efforts of examining spiral of silence within the context of social networking sites (SNSs) is limited (Pang et al., 2016), current research found that rather than encouraging free self-disclosure of political opinion and facilitating public debate, SNSs like Facebook can silence user discussion about controversial issues (e.g., Hampton et al., 2014, Stoycheff, 2016). However, as Hampton et al. (2014) pointed out, existing research fails to “directly explore why people might remain silent if they felt that their opinions were in the minority” (p. 8). For both theoretical and practical perspectives, it is imperative to study the social-psychological process of political self-disclosure via Facebook.
Facebook has become a major source of news consumption. One Pew study (2016b) shows that 66% of American adults get their news from Facebook. Therefore, individuals may heavily rely on their exposure to political information exchanged via Facebook to form their opinions of the political climate. However, due to Facebook's visibility and persistence affordances, many interactions on Facebook could be exposed to a large audience and stored for a long time (Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017). Consequently, Facebook users might be inhibited from voicing unpopular views, in order to avoid undesirable impressions or social isolation in their Facebook networks (Metzger, 2009), which largely overlap with their offline networks (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). One possible reason is that political self-disclosure on SNSs is essentially a form of self-presentation (Eliasoph, 1990), which can impact users' accomplishment of relational and instrumental goals. Therefore, it is necessary to include self-presentational concern in the examination of individuals' political self-disclosure on Facebook and investigate the connection between Facebook technological affordances and users' self-presentational concern.
To fill the gap in current literature, this study aims to expand our understanding of individuals' willingness to express political opinions on Facebook. The purpose is to extend the theoretical framework of the spiral of silence by integrating the perspective of online self-presentation to investigate individuals' expression of political opinions via Facebook. Specifically, we propose that Facebook self-presentational concern (i.e. concerns about one's public image presented on Facebook) should exert its explanatory power in understanding Facebook users' willingness to speak out on controversial issues, a key focus of spiral of silence theory. This study is one of the first attempts to recognize the potential interplay effect of self-presentational concern and perceived opinion climates on political expression on SNSs. The findings of this study will not only contribute to our knowledge of SNSs users' political self-disclosure, but also provide practical implications for raising the awareness of SNSs' role in shaping public opinion.
Section snippets
The spiral of silence
The knowledge of public opinion formation is essential to understanding people's attitudes and behaviors (Donsbach & Traugott, 2008). Scholars have utilized theories such as agenda-setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), framing theory (Scheufele, 1999), and the third-person effect (Davison, 1983) to examine the formation of public opinion in modern societies. Among the classic theoretical frameworks, the spiral of silence is one theory that explains how public opinion is formed and how it can
Sample
Data were collected from survey participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowdsourcing platform. An online survey was composed and hosted on Qualtrics. The survey link was then posted as a paid task on MTurk between October 19th and October 27th, 2016. For each completed survey, each participant was paid 1 US Dollar through the website.
A total of 296 valid responses were collected and subsequently included in the data analysis. Most participants checked Facebook daily (69.6%),
Descriptive statistics
Most participants perceived the scenario of engaging in a public debate on AA as highly realistic (M = 4.55, SD = 0.71). Participants' perception of their Facebook friends' attitude towards AA (M = 3.76, SD = 1.21) was significantly more favorable than their own attitude (M = 3.45, SD = 1.56, t (282) = 3.55, p < .001). With the opinion incongruence between participants and their friends (M = 1.06, SD = 1.09), participants are less likely to comment on the post (M = 2.31, SD = 1.26), share the
Discussion
Prior research has tested the spiral of silence theory on SNSs and lent empirical support to the theory. We extend the spiral of silence framework by introducing the self-presentation perspective and offering an additional explanation about why individuals stay silent when feeling that their opinion is in the minority. Based on the assumption that political self-disclosure contributes to one's public image on SNSs, we connected approval-based CSW and self-presentational concern with three
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