 Hello, once again, let's talk about media and communication. A hot topic today, a well-timed topic today. I invited Martina Novotna to discuss barriers to participation in online discussions, especially on social media platforms like Facebook. And Martina and I will focus our conversation on two topics, very important topics and well-timed. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war. And Martina and I will explore the role that negativity has in this online discussion. So the impact it has on online participation. Martina, welcome to our episode. Thank you very much for having me here. Martina, I went through your article and you mentioned that online discussions can be, of course, and we all know, hostile and civil. They can be filled with disinformation, negative perceptions. And this discourages people from participating in online conversation. So is this the core and the importance of your research? Yeah, I would actually say that these are two main actors we are looking at, in civility and cross-cutting discussion, because when it comes to disagreement, conversation just became more flawed and heated and emotional. So what is actually the importance of our study? It lies in a connection with democracy, we all agree that online political discussions are related to healthy democracy because people can exchange opinions with each other, they can interact and it might actually, ideally just lead to other more complex maybe online political participation. And what is important here about the online public sphere where people just talk with each other is that they can be exposed to different and new perspectives, which again, based on previous research, might lead actually to a decrease of polarization or even critical thinking about the topic. So, however, even though online discussions are very important, there are some uncertainties by the scholars who worry about the barriers. And this is the topic we also look at. These barriers, namely, in civility and disagreement, which on previous studies seems to be as problematic when people exchange opinions. So the core thing here is to look at who is not actually present in this conversation because imbalance of opinions might be very crucial, especially during the crisis time such as COVID-19 pandemic and Russia, Ukraine and war as people, there was a high demand for information. So people are not just actively contributing to conversation, but they are also reading these opinions, which might be actually biased. So a link to democracy and focusing on the barriers and why some people, some groups are not there. And correct me if I'm wrong. Your article intends to feel a void, which is the lack of qualitative studies on the matter as they tend to follow more quantitative approaches. Is that so as well? Yeah, this is the absolutely correct. It's one of the research gap we actually found here. The most of the research is made by quantitative researchers using surveys or experiments. They mainly focus on factors or determinants, but really you will find some study that do it qualitatively. And that was our intention to talk to people who actually actively contribute to this conversation and see what is discussion dynamics, what they feel, what's their behavior and what's other people behavior. And now I'm talking about these participants in the conversation that have different point of view, how participants perceive this disagreement and if it's really problematic to them. Let's hear about them, let us know about the findings. So coming to the findings, the main interesting thing is that as crisis unfolded, we realized that people are just less motivated to contribute to conversation, even though we are talking about very active people who are engaged in conversation, but even those people became less motivated after second year, COVID-19 pandemic. And the reason was quite simple. They had a negative experience with conversations, experiencing and also negatively evaluating this conversation partner as being less educated or as being less intelligent, doing grammar mistakes and so on. But we are then talking about, not only about other participants, but also about the people who doesn't share their point of view. And coming back to the interesting point for me, it's that those people just lack a neutral position. What wasn't here was some middle ground. So taking example of COVID-19 vaccination, there were people who were against the vaccination and those who were supporting, but our participants reflected that there is no middle ground, no opinion that would be just in the middle. And a part of negative feelings and negative views of other participants, some of them also felt kind of uncomfortable to be part of this conversation. These people were usually less active on social network sites, maybe less assertive and less extreme. Those people were most likely to be discouraged to take part in conversation. To summarize maybe our findings, I would point out also this information that was one of the characteristics prescribed to the people from the other side, those who doesn't share the opinion. So they were described as those who shared this information. So to get, take it together, disinformation, negative evaluation, but also perceived polarization between those two groups where the main characteristics that discourage people to be active in online conversation, especially those less active, which is just in line with previous research for instance, Hamilovsky et al. 2014. And I assume as you said, the exclusion of these groups can have consequences on the quality of the public discourse, I think. So let's explore this. Let's explore the impact of your findings can have on public policy, your society, policy implications of this. I think coming back to the harmful impact of that we are missing some voices in conversation might be related to content moderation, which is also already happening on social network sites, but I would just push policymakers or social media owners to work more on how we should filter this problematic content out, because there are several types of uncivil attacks that are problematic, but some of them we can all agree. And also the participants kind of recognize the red line because it's a matter of personal characteristics, how they perceive the problematic and civil attacks. But when it comes to xenophobic comments, racism or comments against human rights, they all felt that this is beyond the red border. So together with content moderation, we should be sensible of which content should be blocked and which not, because we are kind of balancing on a border between free speech and censorship as well. Some suggestions maybe also for users, which is based on our study will go for blocking problematic behavior that can help not only to those people who have struggles, but also other people who feel more sensitive and uncertain to contribute to such conversation. Maybe toward the conversation about more extreme opinions because it doesn't mean that we just miss some people in conversation, but it can also lead to extreme opinions sharing, which again in the context of crisis time it's even more crucial. So policymakers maybe here needs to establish some tools or education programs, how to actually perceive information on social network sites, because as I already said, online conversation may be also the source of information not only contributing actively to these talks. So some recommendations for the platforms, the users and the policymakers. Let's get back to academia now. So what's left to research now? More groups, more platforms, more qualitative studies. What's ahead of us now? That's a really nice question. So I believe that we kind of shed light on dynamics and online conversation from the perspective of qualitative research. But to be transparent, this is case study from Central and Eastern European regions. So we need probably more research that is done within this area and compared with other contexts, because I can talk about the Czech Republic where the Facebook, it's the most popular platform and we did research on Facebook. But there are differences in different contexts and also within different social media platforms. So the Facebook in 2021, 2022, when we collect the data, it's not Facebook, which is today. So we need more studies that will focus on comparison between and across different platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube and so on. But also to pay attention, like to behavior of these users online, which may be different Facebook users two years ago might be different than now. So I would really recommend to look at the platforms and also different contexts. And as well, the qualitative study, which are really, really here within this area, my last recommendation for further research would be connected to this information because I found it really fascinating to see the connection between civility and disinformation as people have evaluated people with different opinions as more uncivil, spreading disinformation. So definitely there needs to be done more on this topic. Still a lot to research there. Can you provide some additional resources about the topic discussed today? Yeah, we are kind of in a podcast format. So my first suggestion would go for podcast episodes, social media and politics, especially episode with Patricia Rossini, who has done a lot of work on civility and intolerance. So I highly recommend this. If you're maybe more fun of some books, so I have also some suggestions that I really love about this topic. For instance, Gina Masoulo, Chen Nesty Talks, or Emily Sidnor, who looks at the civility from more psychological perspective. One of other actors that was important for our study was crosscutting discussion, disagreement. So the last book recommendation would be Christian Vakary and Augusto Valeriani, who has done work on outside the bubble, social media and political participation in Western democracies overall. My last suggestion would be related to specific context, maybe a different one, because we detect some characteristic that might have an impact on discouragement to be imparted on a conversation. So the wonderful work has been done by Lenka Bohotsova, who focused on the context of immigration, which is another controversial and polarizing topic, same as the COVID-19 crisis or Russia-Ukrainian war, and she has done an article named Frustrated Women Invite the Immigrants to Europe. So that would be my last suggestion. Sure. And to our listeners, all these recommendations that Martina just shared will be available in the Let's Talk about Media and Communication website on that episode page. Below the video, if you scroll down, all these materials will be available. Martina, this has been a straight-on-the-point episode, but I'm going to ask you to, as I ask all our speakers, if there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk in one or two sentences, the punchline, what would it be? So one of them will be that instability is a problematic pattern, but we need to take into account personal characteristic of participants in online conversation, because some of them just feel resilient towards it, even though this group of people was just a minority within our qualitative study, there was a rapid decrease in willingness to participate within the crisis context, which I think that it's important because we can look at the other crisis and to see if there is a different or similar pattern. And lastly, incivility and perceived polarization has been a significant barrier for engaging in discussions for most of our participants. So to look closer for demobilizing patterns of discussion to go, I think. Martina, it was a pleasure. Thank you. For those who are watching us on YouTube, all the resources that I said before and the article that services base for this conversation, you can find them on, let's talk about Media and Communication website on the episode page. You can also listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast, if you prefer alternative content, subscribe to our newsletter there and follow us on social media. Thank you very much. Thank you.