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Digital communication platforms are rapidly changing the nature of political discourses. At the same time, the functionality of democratic societies largely depends on deliberative exchanges between citizens. However, ecologically valid research on the effects of digital communication environments on deliberation is scarce. To fill this gap, the present work investigates the effects of two dimensions of online communication platforms: message persistence and anonymity of users. Two competing hypotheses are tested: the social risk avoidance hypothesis, assuming an inhibition of political opinion expression through highly persistent and non-anonymous communication channels, and the personal and political efficacy hypothesis, proposing a facilitation of political opinion expression under the same conditions. In a one-week field experiment, N = 960 participants were randomly assigned to discussion groups of 20 members varying in persistence and anonymity. Results showed no main effect of these two affordances on users’ political expression behavior. Instead, we observed an active calculus of costs and benefits which were associated with decreased versus increased expressive behavior. Costs were seen as higher when anonymity was low. Our findings suggest that variations of social media affordances such as anonymity and persistence may not be as decisive for users’ expressive behavior as current literature suggests.
Frauhammer et al. (Fri,) studied this question.