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Political talk on mobile instant messaging services: a comparative analysis of Germany, Italy, and the UK
journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-25, 11:00 authored by Augusto Valeriani, Cristian VaccariMobile instant messaging services (MIMS) are emerging as important digital environments in citizens’ everyday lives. We explore the use of MIMS for talking about politics with unique survey data on samples representative of Internet users in Germany, Italy, and the UK. First, we show that robust percentages of our respondents who use MIMS employ them for posting political messages and discussing politics. Second, we demonstrate that political talk on MIMS is positively associated with users’ tendency to censor themselves politically on social networking sites (SNS) and, to a lesser extent, with ideological extremism. Third, we find that the association between self-censorship on SNS and the likelihood of publishing political contents on MIMS is stronger for individuals living in former East Germany where, due to historical reasons, large segments of the population are reluctant to talk about politics in public. Our findings suggest that MIMS make a distinctive contribution to contemporary repertoires of political talk, with important implications for the quality and inclusiveness of interpersonal political discussion.
History
Published in
Information Communication and SocietyVolume
21Issue
11Pages
1715 - 1731Citation
VALERIANI, A. and VACCARI, C., 2017. Political talk on mobile instant messaging services: a comparative analysis of Germany, Italy, and the UK. Information, Communication and Society, 21 (11), pp.1715-1731.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-06-28Publication date
2017-08-07Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information, Communication and Society on 07 Aug 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1350730ISSN
1369-118XeISSN
1468-4462Publisher version
Language
- en