Deliberative Qualities of Online Abortion Discourse: Incivility and Intolerance in the American and Irish Abortion Discussions on Twitter

Abstract

This paper provides a big-data-scale assessment of the deliberative qualities of online abortion discussions on Twitter in the United States (2020) and Ireland (2018) by specifically focusing on two standards: civility and tolerance for constructive disagreements. Using diverse computational methods and classification, our regression analysis provides mixed evaluations. We find that incivility and intolerance are uncommon behaviours in American and Irish abortion discourse on Twitter, but we also find that these anti-deliberative behaviours are (a) generating more engagements and thereby distorting the overall discussion atmosphere; (b) largely coming from the pro-life tweets; (c) dominated by a small set of hyperactive participants; and that (d) intolerant users tend to communicate within homogeneous echo chambers. Our results indicate that it is crucial for online deliberation to curtail the capabilities of these superparticipants distorting and radicalising the overall online political discourse. By studying two national contexts, our results provide comparability of our findings and insights that can improve our understanding of other contentious and polarised issues more broadly.