Replication Data for: Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates

Recent advancements in online streaming technologies have re-centered the audi-ence as an important part of live broadcasts, including live political events. In fall2020, each of the U.S. presidential and vice presidential debates were streamed ona number of online platforms that provided an integrated streaming chat wherethe public could comment in real-time alongside the live debate video. Viewerscould simultaneously tune into what the candidates were saying and see what asample of their peers thought about the candidates. This study examines largesamples of comments made in social chat feeds during the livestreamed debates onthe ABC News, NBC News, and Fox News Facebook pages to quantify key featuresassociated with the quality of political discussion on these platforms. The resultsreveal that consistent with quasi-anonymous, constrained nature of the dynamicchat, the comments made are generally short, include a substantial degree of tox-icity and insults, and differ significantly in their content across platforms. Thesefindings underscore the importance of further study of online streaming chat as anew source of potential influence on political attitudes and behavior.