Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies

2022; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ct/qtac008

1468-2885

Chris Wells,

Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection

Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies. Vaccari, C. & Valeriani, A. (2021). New York: Oxford University Press, $27.95 paperback, 287 pages. Social media as moderating forces in political communication? You may be forgiven for finding the idea outlandish, following years of hate speech and harassment, the polarizing effects of engagement-seeking algorithms, and mis- and disinformation circulating on social media platforms. Yet in Outside the Bubble, Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani offer a powerful case—and present compelling multinational evidence—that when it comes to political participation, social media may do more to mitigate differences than reinforce them. The book’s motivating observation is that for most citizens, most of the time, social media are not media of political communication. Moreover, for the preponderance of citizens, it is the lifeworld-rooted Facebook, and not the more explicitly political Twitter, that forms the core of social media experience. This...