Ideological and language polarization in online political discourse: the White House Facebook page

This essay explores contemporary political discourse in Computer-mediated communication by analysing the language used in the public discussions on the White House Facebook page during the 2014 State of the Union address, delivered by President Barack Obama. After addressing the notion of the “public sphere” in the context of social networks and political communication in them, the essay looks at the nature of the language of the discussion in a representative corpus of users’ comments. It has been observed that most comments lack coherence and relevance and no constructive dialogue can be built, as many comments consist in insults. The deep ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans, broadly coincident with Pro-Obama and Anti-Obama users, is then viewed in semantic terms by analysing the corpus with the LIWC software. The resulting picture is that of an “argument culture” in which failure in social communication seems to be the most distinctive feature.