Study:

Social media perpetuates "spiral of silence"

Thursday, September 4, 2014 - 12:35 YT&Twebzine

What if you were a bleeding-heart liberal living in a backwater Georgia town thick with Republicans or a staunch conservative living in the heart of liberal Boston? Would you express your political opinions or keep your mouth shut?

Most people lay low, according to the Pew Research Center. Indeed, the tendency for people who hold minority views to suppress their opinions is known as the "spiral of silence." While this might not be news in polite society, a recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that even on social media outlets – where everyone appears ready to spout off – users hold back if they believe their ideas are not widely shared.
Pew’s conclusions come from a survey of 1,800 adults regarding Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of widespread government surveillance of Americans’ phone and email records. The center focused on this controversial issue because research showed that the public was dividedover whether the surveillance was justifiable and whether Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, should have made his claims public. The Pew report found:

The “spiral of silence” is alive and well on social media.
Social media users are not as brazen as they may seem. “If a person felt that people in their Facebook network agreed with their opinion about the Snowden-NSA issue, they were about twice as likely to join a discussion on Facebook about this issue,” the report found.

As opposed to discussing their views about government surveillance on social media, survey respondents were more likely to open up in person.
More respondents are willing to express dicey opinions at a family dinner than on Facebook or Twitter. Respondents were asked: “If the topic of the government surveillance programs came up in these settings, how willing would you be to join in the conversation?” Overall, 86 percent of the respondents were willing to have a face-to-face discussion about the issue, but only 42 percent of Facebook or Twitter users were willing to write posts on those platforms. And while 40 percent said they would be very willing to have such a discussion over family dinner, only 16 percent said the same about posting their remarks on Facebook and 14 percent said the same about Twitter.

Beyond the fact that social media did not provide an alternative forum for this issue, social media users were also less willing to share their opinions face to face.
A Facebook user who logs on a few times a day is actually “half as likely to be willing to have a discussion about the Snowden-NSA issues at a physical public meeting as a non-Facebook user,” the report found.

Social media doesn’t necessarily inform users.
Asked where they were getting information about Snowden, most survey respondents referred to traditional broadcast and news sources. Pew found that a majority -- 58 percent -- got at least some of their information about the Snowden story from television or radio. In contrast, only 15 percent got information while on Facebook and 3 percent got information on Twitter.

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