Shaping Facebook and Twitter Public Spheres: The Case of Swiss Franc Mortgage Holders in Poland

• Authors: Kamil Filipek , Andrzej Cwynar , Wiktor Cwynar , Jarosław Szkoła
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article focuses on the online communication on Polish Facebook and Twitter around issues related to mortgage loans in Swiss francs. Based on 20k posts retrieved from both Facebook and Twitter, we found the most active actors and the most common topics appearing on those micro-public spheres. It was revealed that actors with institutional affiliation and those who are not affiliated discuss different problems and share dissimilar content related to Swiss franc debts. It was also found that certain categories of actors may influence online discussions on both social networking sites by promoting specific content in order to pursue their institutional interests. Finally, the diversity of topics and problems discussed by the two categories of actors identified on Facebook and Twitter suggest that Swiss franc mortgage holders are a good example of “connective action” with no clear identity or community traits that led to favourable judgment of the European Court of Justice. 

PL

The article focuses on the online communication on Polish Facebook and Twitter around issues related to mortgage loans in Swiss francs. Based on 20k posts retrieved from both Facebook and Twitter, we found the most active actors and the most common topics appearing on those micro-public spheres. It was revealed that actors with institutional affiliation and those who are not affiliated discuss different problems and share dissimilar content related to Swiss franc debts. It was also found that certain categories of actors may influence online discussions on both social networking sites by promoting specific content in order to pursue their institutional interests. Finally, the diversity of topics and problems discussed by the two categories of actors identified on Facebook and Twitter suggest that Swiss franc mortgage holders are a good example of “connective action” with no clear identity or community traits that led to favourable judgment of the European Court of Justice. 

Keywords

EN

Facebook; Twitter; public sphere; topic-modelling

PL

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. Instytut Socjologii
• Journal: Konteksty Społeczne
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2020

online

2020-11-21

Contributors

author

Kamil Filipek

author

Andrzej Cwynar

author

Wiktor Cwynar

author

Jarosław Szkoła

References

• An, J., Quercia, D., & Crowcroft, J. (2014). Partisan sharing. In Proceedings of the second edition of the ACM conference on Online social networks - COSN ’14 (pp. 13–24). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2660460.2660469
• Balabantaray, R. C., Mohammad, M., & Sharma, N. (2012). Multi-class Twitter emotion classification: A new approach. International Journal of Applied Information Systems, 4(1), 48–53.
• Batorski, D., & Grzywińska, I. (2017). Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 4462(February), 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1281329
• Benkler, Y. (2004). Sharing nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production. The Yale Law Journal, 114(2), 273–358.
• Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661
• Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192–205. http://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0353
• Blumler, J. G. (1979). The Role of Theory in Uses and Gratifications Studies. Communication Research, 6(1), 9–36. http://doi.org/10.1177/009365027900600102
• Boulianne, S. (2015). Social media use and participation: A meta-analysis of current research. Information, Communication & Society, (March), 37–41. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1008542
• Boyd, D. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). http://doi.org/10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.119
• Bureau of Credit Information — Poland. (2017). The picture of sector — January 2017. Extracted from: https://media.bik.pl/informacje-prasowe/att/1090989
• CBOS. (2017). Media online. 53/2017. http://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2017/K_053_17.PDF
• Centrum Grabskiego. (2016). Raport ‘Kredyty frankowe. Strony sporu i ich argumenty’. http://centrumgrabskiego.pl/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Raport-Kredyty-frankowe-Strony-sporu-i-ich-argumenty.pdf
• Daoud, A., & Kohl, S. (2016). How much do sociologists write about economic topics? Using big data to test some conventional views in economic sociology, 1890 to 2014 (No. 16/7). MPIfG Discussion Paper.
• Dickerson, J. P., Kagan, V., & Subrahmanian, V. S. (2014). Using sentiment to detect bots on Twitter: Are humans more opinionated than bots? In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (pp. 620–627).
• Digrazia, J., Mckelvey, K., Bollen, J., & Rojas, F. (2013). More Tweets, more votes: Social media as a quantitative indicator of political behavior, 8(11), 1–5. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079449
• DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., & Blei, D. (2013). Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding. Poetics, 41(6), 570–606. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2013.08.004
• Ferrara, E. (2015). Manipulation and abuse on social media. ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, (Spring) (4). https://doi.org/10.1145/2749279.2749283
• Ferrara, E., & Yang. Z. (2015). Measuring emotional contagion in social media. PLoS ONE, 11(10), 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390
• Filipek, K., & Chodak, J. (2016). Introduction: Rediscovering society in the age of social media. Konteksty Społeczne/Social Contexts, Special Issue: Rediscovering Society in the Age of Social Media, 4(1), 5–11.
• Fuchs, C. (2013). Twitter and democracy: A new public sphere? In Social Media: A Critical Introduction (pp. 179–209). Sage.
• Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media and the public sphere. tripleC, 12(1), 57–101.
• Fuchs, C. (2015). Culture and economy in the age of social media. Routledge.
• Gorwa, R. (2017). Computational propaganda in Poland: False amplifiers and the digital public sphere. In S. Wooley & P. N. Howard (Eds.), Working Paper 2017.2 (pp. 1–37). Oxford, UK. http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/
• Graells-Garrido, E., Lalmas, M., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2015). Finding intermediary topics between people of opposing views: A case study. arXiv Preprint arXiv:1506.00963. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00963
• Gruzd, A. (2013). Emotions in the Twitterverse and implications for user interface design. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(1), 42–56.
• Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere (1968 First). MIT Press.
• Himelboim, I., Smith, M. A., Rainie, L., Shneiderman, B., & Espina, C. (2017). Classifying Twitter topic-networks using social network analysis. Social Media + Society, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117691545
• Humphreys, A. (2016). Social media. Enduring principle. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Editorial expression of concern: Experimental evidence of massive scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(29), 8788–8790. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1412469111
• Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2011). Online social networking and addiction—A review of the psychological literature. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 8(9), 3528–3552. http://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph8093528
• Lewis, S. C. (2015). Reciprocity as a key concept for social media and society. Social Media + Society, 1(1). http://doi.org/10.1080/1
• Lin, N. (1999). Building a network theory of social capital. Connections, 22(1), 28–51. http://doi.org/10.1108/14691930410550381
• Lin, N. (2001). Social capital. A theory of social structure and action. University Press. http://doi.org/10.1007/s13398-014-0173-7.2
• Lin, N., Cook, K., & Burt, R. (2001). Social capital. theory and research. Aldine de Gruyter.
• Lin, R., & Utz, S. (2015). The emotional responses of browsing Facebook: Happiness, envy, and the role of tie strength. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 29–38. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.04.064
• Lindgren, S., & Cocq, C. (2017). Turning the inside out: Social media and the broadcasting of indigenous discourse. European Journal of Communication, 32(2), 131–150. http://doi.org/10.1177/0267323116674112
• Meikle, G. (2016). Social media. Communication, sharing and visibility. Routledge.
• Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 887–900. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043135
• Miłkowski, M., & Weiss, D. (2016). PoliMorfologik. https://github.com/morfologik/polimorfologik.
• Mohammed, S. N. (2012). The (dis)information age. The persistence of ignorance. Peter Lanf Publishing.
• Morozov, E. (2009). Brave new world of slacktivism. Foreign Policy, (19.05). http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/05/19/the-brave-new-world-of-slacktivism/
• Pew Research Center. (2015). The evolving role of news on Twitter and Facebook. http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/
• Pew Research Center. (2016). The modern news consumer. http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer/
• Radio Poland. (2012). To koniec kredytów we frankach (This is the end of Swiss-franc loans). http://www.polskieradio.pl/42/259/Artykul/570277
• Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. The MIT Press.
• Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community. Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-Wesley.
• Ryan, T., Chester, A., Reece, J., & Xenos, S. (2014). The uses and abuses of Facebook: A review of Facebook addiction. Journal of Behavioural Addictions, 3(3), 133–148. http://doi.org/10.1556/JBA.3.2014.016
• Sokolova, M., Huang, K., Matwin, S., Ramisch, J., Sazonova, V., Black, R., Orwa, Ch., Ochieng, S., Sambuli, N. (2016). Topic modelling and event identification from Twitter textual data, 17. http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02519
• Stringhini, G., Kruegel, C., & Vigna, G. (2010). Detecting spammers on social networks. In The 26th annual computer security applications conference. ACM (pp. 1–9). http://doi.org/10.18535/ijecs/v6i2.14
• Sunstein, C. R. (2007). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press.
• Tang, G., & Lee, F. L. F. (2013). Facebook use and political participation: The impact of exposure to shared political information, connections with public political actors, and network structural heterogeneity. Social Science Computer Review, 31(6), 763–773. http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439313490625
• van der Graaf, A., Otjes, S., & Rasmussen, A. (2016). Weapon of the weak? The social media landscape of interest groups. European Journal of Communication, 31(2), 120–135. http://doi.org/10.1177/0267323115612210
• van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity. A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
• Vitak, J., Zube, P., Smock, A., Carr, C. T., Ellison, N., & Lampe, C. (2011). It’s complicated: Facebook users’ political participation in the 2008 election, 14(3). http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2009.0226
• We Are Social, & Hootsuite. (2017). Digital in 2017: Global overview. https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2017/01/digital-in-2017-global-overview
• Weiss, D. (2005). A survey of freely available Polish stemmers and evaluation of their applicability in information retrieval. 2nd Language and Technology Conference, Poznan, Poland, pp. 216–221. http://morfologik.blogspot.com/

Identifiers

DOI

10.17951/ks.2020.8.1.5-23