IDEOLOGICAL AND LANGUAGE POLARIZATION IN ONLINE POLITICAL DISCOURSE The White House Facebook page

This paper 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, the paper looks at the nature of the language of the discussion in a large corpus of users’ comments. The analysis of the corpus has revealed that the quality of political discourse in US politics has not improved despite the affordances of computer-mediated communication. The deep ideological polarization of Democrats and Republicans, broadly coincident with Pro-Obama and Anti-Obama users, dominates the online discussion: most comments lack relevance, in that they violate Grice’s conversational maxim of Relation, and many of them include abusive language. The corpus is then analyzed by using LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), a text analysis software program which measures words according to their linguistic or semantic category. The results of the analysis in semantic terms (according to seven categories of words associated with “Personal Concerns”) are a further indication that Pro-Obama and Anti-Obama users employ distinctive communication languages which impede dialogue on important issues. This is evidence of an “argument culture”, in which failure in communication seems to be the most distinctive feature