The Character of Connection: Platform Affordances and Connective Democracy

While social media optimistically holds the potential to ameliorate political divides by increasing cross-cutting political talk, numerous studies suggest that social media has instead exacerbated political polarization. Yet, social media is incredibly heterogeneous and variation in platform affordances may result in markedly different democratic outcomes. In this article, we turn to the principles of connective democracy to inform a cross-topic and cross-platform analysis. Our mixed-methods study compares conversations across Twitter and Reddit, finding that Twitter conversations are highly polarized across topics while Reddit displays some promise for enabling productive, intergroup discourse. We argue that this difference is driven by an affordance of conversational visibility in which users can see and engage with conversations as a whole. We further argue that “community” is a distinctive platform affordance that emerges from shared user expectations. This affordance supports user socialization into democratic norms of productive intergroup contact and therefore may prove particularly important to enhancing connective democracy.