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AbstractThis paper aims to investigate the level of civility of Indonesians' political discussions on Facebook. Civility, which has always been an important concept in online political discussion, is particularly significant when there is diversity of opinions and disputation. While previous studies have focused more upon factors such as anonymity's role and its relevance to civility, this paper proposes two further important factors: (1) diversity of opinion and disagreement in discussion and (2) the cultural context of the country and how it determines civility and politeness in online debate. Qualitative content analysis of Indonesians' political discussions on Facebook revealed that polarized political views and the people's politeness culture were two significant factors underpinning the high level of civility in political discussion.Keywords: civilitypolitenessdiversity of opinionsdisagreementonline political discussionIndonesia AcknowledgmentsThe author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this paper.Notes on contributorHamideh Molaei has recently finished her PhD thesis titled Social media and politics: Examining the effectiveness of social media for social movements and political discussions in Indonesia in the Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia. Her interest is on the Internet and political participation in Indonesia. Her other interest is intercultural communication and she has published several papers in this area. She has Bachelor and Master degrees in social communication sciences from the University of Tehran, Iran.
Hamideh Molaei (Tue,) studied this question.