The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

“In part, this reflects fundamental methodological problems in distinguishing between homophily and social influence using standard data (Shalizi & Thomas 2011), and in part, genuine ambiguity in research results.”

“The impact of information and communication technologies, the internet, and social media in our lives, and particularly within the political context, has been under academic scrutiny for over a decade (see Farrell, 2012 for a review).”

“…by lowering the transaction costs of communication, connecting individuals with similar views (homophilous sorting), revealing other individuals’ preferences (reducing preference falsification), and, therefore, lowering the barrier to collective action (Farrell, 2012; Karpf, 2012; Shirky, 2009).”

“The internet thus has implications for both politics and climate scientists; as a technology that is becoming politically normalised, climate policies are expected to be increasingly influenced by online debates (Farrell, 2012).”

“As noted by Farrell (2012), the extant scholarly debate on the political implications of the Internet focuses on the manifest outcomes, such as popular protests and regime breakdown.”

“…the effects of computermediated communication (CMC) on political engagement and on willingness to take part in collective actions (e.g. Brunsting & Postmes, 2002; Castells, 1996; Rheingold, 1995), and some controversy has emerged (e.g. Farrell, 2012; Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Sunstein, 2002).”

“…its effects could be altered fundamentally because the rise of the Internet, and in particular new social media, has caused a revolution of social networking by making interpersonal contacts extremely easy and costless, and thus has significantly reduced the cost of collective action (Farrell 2012).”

“It is commonly assumed that the Internet eliminates barriers to communication, making it easier for individuals to find and associate with others who share their views (Benkler, 2006; Farrell, 2012).”

“Social networking through blogging (Stone, 2004) was in its early stages but Facebook and Twitter and their impact on socio-political processes (Farrell, 2012) were still some years away.”

“The advent of the internet is also believed to contribute to the polarization process (Farrell, 2012).”

“…theory of preference falsification (Kuran, 1997), which holds that the public is likely to conceal the true preferences for the opposition to authoritarian societies in order to avoid punishment, which leads to the divergence of publicly expressed preferences from true preferences (Farrell, 2012).”

“The use of computers to predict voters behavior is not new (Farrell, 2012; Jon B., 1998; Macintosh, Malina, & Farrell, 2002).”

“Research on the effect of social media on social mobilization, especially in authoritarian contexts, has been particularly extensive (Farrell, 2012; Gohdes, 2020; Tucker et al., 2016; Tufekci, 2017).”

“The fragmented communication in Twitter is also determined by people’s participation in groups with relatively homogeneous characteristics—homophily (Farrell, 2012).”

“In contrast, individuals who are cross-pressured in their communities may choose more frequently to conceal true preferences – often referred to as “preference falsification” (Farrell 2012; Kuran 1995).”

“While scholars have attributed emerging but limited space for freedom of expression in autocracies to media marketization and Internet penetration (Farrell, 2012; Shirk, 2010; Tufekci and Wilson, 2012), the media environment in authoritarian societies has not become as liberal as expected.”

“On the other hand, the ever-increasing availability of technology such as radio, TV, satellite TV, mobile phones, and the Internet lowers the cost to the citizenry of coordination of organizing political protest (Farrell, 2012; Lee, 2014; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012).”

“These previous incidents led the authors to question, why previous selfimmolations did not spark a similar development as Bouazizi’s suicide? Although the importance of free media for democratic transitions has been discussed extensively (e.g. Randall, 1998: 3; Garon, 2003; Schmitt-Beck & Voltmer, 2007; Farrell, 2012)…”

“…deflect attention from the degree to which national contexts continue to influence trends in civic engagement (Brym, Godbout, Hoffbauer, Menard, & Zhang, 2014; Brym, Slavina, Todosijevic, & Cowan, 2018; Esfandiari, 2010; Farrell, 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Morozov, 2011; Uldam, 2016; Zhang & Brym, 2019).”

“The fi rst is related to the fact that online social media have become major platforms from which individuals deal with political issues (Attia, Aziz, Friedman, & Elhusseiny, 2011; Farrell, 2012; Youmans & York, 2012).”

“As Farrell (2012) discusses, online communication facilitates ‘homophilous sorting’ – the propensity of individuals who are similar on some meaningful dimension to form clusters with each other.”

“A comprehensive review by Farrell (2012) concludes that, at this point, there are not enough data to determine whether the internet is a significant or an insignificant factor when it comes to political shifts in Egypt and Tunisia.”

“Echoing Farrell (2012), Boulianne calls for more nuanced research of the relationships between specific types of Internet use and specific civic and political activities.”

“…tends to lead to more extreme views (Baron et al. 1996), and some scholars have maintained that new media usages lead to online sorting or homophily, generating ‘‘echo chambers’’ where people tend to consume information that re-inforces their preexisting opinions (Sunstein 2002; Farrell 2012).”

“…gateway to knowing the integrative dynamics of civil societies (Baldassarri and Diani, 2007), and this present study of inter-organizational virtual networking is, in part, a response to the debate on the fragmentation (Dahlberg, 2007) and polarization (Farrell, 2012) of virtual space in academia.”

“…” , for instance their potential impact on the decline of deliberative politics, the fomenta-tion of extreme ideology, and political polarization (Farrell, 2012; Lee et al. , 2014; Colleoni et al. , 2014; Barberá et al. , 2015; Flaxman et al. , 2016; Bail et al. , 2018; Eady et al. , 2019).”

“Many social scientists still believe that the Internet is not a serious area of scholarly investigation (Farrell, 2012) and few are adequately prepared to answer the questions that continue to arise in the media since the 2011 Arab Spring.”

“Moreover, considering “the Internet” as an undifferentiated medium is problematic in itself, masking the variety of political mobilization forms that occur online (Earl, Kimport, Prieto, Rush, & Reynoso, 2010; Farrell, 2012; see also Earl & Kimport, 2011).”

“Lastly, building on earlier work on internet politics (Farrell 2012; Farrell and Newman 2019; Newman 2008) and on weap-onised interdependence (Henry and Newman 2019), Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Underground empire: How America weaponized the world economy demonstrates how this competition…”

“Scholars have identified social media and the pervasive use of the internet as some of the factors contributing to this phenomenon [12, 13].”

“Although the impact of technology on civil society is an important topic in the study of tech-driven authoritarianism (Diamond, 2010; Farrell, 2012; Koc-Michalska and Lilleker, 2017; Schlaeger and Jiang, 2014), when data are produced from the side of civil society, scholars are answering questions…”

“This latest rise in populism has coincided with the emergence of a similarly concerning ‘ post-truth ’ moment, with the homophily of online environments often cited as a reinforcing factor (Farrell 2012).”

“partisan niches that reinforce their established views or to drop out of politics entirely has been extensively investigated, albeit with mixed results (Farrell, 2012; Iyengar and Hahn, 2009; Prior, 2005; Stroud, 2008).”

“Farrell (2012), for example, maintains that for individuals the expression of personal points of view is made simpler and more spontaneous on sites of this type, while Campus (2012) emphasises that a significant part of political conversation takes place in informal contexts, as the social networks…”

“The alleged anonymity on the Internet can encourage individuals to share their ‘true’ preferences (Farrell, 2012), especially in places where the public sphere is heavily restricted (Chen et al., 2016).”

“The internet and the services it has enabled have changed how we work [1], travel [2], socialise [3] and even how we engage with politics [4], government [5] and the rest of society [6].”

“I was then able to probe further what principals liked or disliked about the changes in religion policy.(52)”

“According to Fielding (2004), “student voice covers a range of activities that encourage reflection, discussion, dialogue and action on matters that primarily concern students, but also, by implication, [university] staff and the communities they serve” (p.”

“In fact, political homophily on SNS has been raised as the main drive for electoral mobilization in recent political communication studies (Farrell, 2012).”

“In contrast, individuals who are cross-pressured in their communities may choose more frequently to conceal true preferences—often referred to as ‘‘preference falsification’’ (Farrell 2012; Kuran 1995).”

“The 21 century’s connectivity provided the youth with new engaging spaces that fostered a sense of collective agency among those of similar struggles in the Arab world and beyond (Farrell, 2012; Gamson, 2011).”

“Over the last 30 years, the world has undergone a radical expansion in the exchange of goods, services, and information (Berger 2000; Farrell 2012; Oatley et al. 2013).”

“We situate this as a contribution to a burgeoning IPE research agenda that takes the peculiarities of knowledge production in the digital age seriously (Farrell and Drezner 2008, Farrell 2012, Zhuravskaya et al. 2020, Atal 2020).”

“This phenomenon has been identified in sociology as preference falsification which can occur due to social pressure to confirm [16], [23], [24], [25].”

“Guided by “homophilous sorting” (Farrell, 2012; McPherson et al., 2001), individuals form clusters based on similar beliefs.”

“In this way, I was able to go beyond probing what principals like or dislike about the religion-in-education policy (Farrell, 2012).”

“From the 2010s, a series of events—ranging from the Arab Spring, Snowden’s revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Russian interference in the 2016 US election—demonstrated the importance of digital technologies (Farrell, 2012; Ziegler, 2018).”

“transparency of online communication activities make it easier for organizations to locate those with similar interests and more difficult to conceal their preferences, thereby strengthening the homophily effect [59].”

“A blossoming political science literature studies the e ff ects of online political communication (e.g., Farrell, 2012; Jungherr et al., 2020; Tucker et al., 2018).”

“The bandwagon conversion effect (Waddell, 2018) and mobilization effect (Farrell, 2012) were often observed in online environments.”

“The Web, together with online social networks (OSNs), allows political parties and the population to spread their opinions quickly and to a large audience, which may amplify the political polarization process around the world (Adamic and Glance 2005; Farrell 2012; Farrell and Drezner 2008).”

“Social media’s increasingly significant role in modern political life is generally acknowledged (see Farrell, 2012).”

“The role of social networking in civic participation and political action was also studied in [30] and through the informal dissemination of ideas in [31].”

“6 platforms and search engines, as some have forcefully argued (DiMaggio et al., 2004; Farrell, 2012).”

“…un medio que facilita la participación política, se basan en su potencial democrático, su capacidad para llegar a una amplia audiencia, de asociación con otros individuos (Farrell, 2012), y de acceso a diferentes puntos de vista, trascendiendo las distancias físicas (Brundidge & Rice, 2009).”

“It is now recognized that early concerns over homophily may be overstated (Farrell, 2012), so it seems unwarranted to lay the fractious nature of post-revolutionary politics on social media alone.”