Political conversations on my Facebook newsfeed?

In my first observation I could figure out two different things:

Firstly, I liked many Facebook pages of newspapers and magazines, which means I see current articles about political happenings in my newsfeed and hence can read the comments under this article or the content of the article.

Secondly, I have a lot of friends who are politically active or socially committed and also let their Facebook community know about this and their opinion.

I scrolled down my Facebook newsfeed for the last 17 days and could notice:

Especially 4 of my Facebook friends are posting about the current happenings and ongoing discussions in the world everyday. They share links and respond to the comments under the shared links.

What is interesting is the fact that mostly people were commenting with the same or similar political view. They were discussing what could be improved or shared more information about a topic. Sometimes they had a different kind of view on a particular topic, but on a minimal level.

So no big political debates in my Facebook network?

I asked all 4 of them if they share their opinion openly, which means making their newsfeed accessible to all Facebook users or if it is just accessible to their friends or friends of friends.

As they are all having their private settings on “just visible for friends” it explains the findings above easily.

Most of their Facebook friends probably have the same political attitude or at least not a complete different view of things and therefore there are no or not many comments which contain an “argumentation”.

It would be interesting if there are more findings in academic research to this finding, I am sure there are.

Let us go back to the Facebook pages of newspapers and magazines. Of course the comments show different point of views in the comments and of course people have different opinions about things (would be sad if it would not be that way).

But this is what I observed:

(The following is put in very easy words and I know that I am throwing around with stereotypes, but there is a point)

The way of commenting or arguing with others, depends a lot on the level of quality and credibility of the (online-) newspaper or (online-) magazine.

If it is a “heavy” quality paper, the comments and argumentations between the commentators are of a higher quality than the comments under postings from a tabloid newspaper.

The latter has comments under its postings, which include politically extreme standpoints, swearwords and sometimes not a clear argumentation in their critical comments.

Whereas the quality paper has comments, which are more structured. The commentators are using more arguments, cite other papers to proof their point and tend to stay more objective.

All in all interesting findings, which would be interesting to research further in- depth.