DOES MEDIA MATTER? VARIATION OF VK AND FACEBOOK DELIBERATIVE CAPACITIES (EVIDENCE FROM DISCUSSIONS ON THE CRIMEA CRISIS)
This paper considers political talk online in two similar social networks: Facebook and VK. Due to the proliferation of professionally produced entertainment content in VK, we suppose that users of this network produce more deliberative discussions, while Facebook users are more engaged in online activity. Selecting 23 news posts, which were simultaneously posted in both social networks, we collected 7676 comments. This study has two hypotheses: (1) Facebook users are more participative in online public spaces than VK users and (2) talk in public spaces in VK is more deliberative than in Facebook. While the former was fully proved by the results, the latter was only partially approved. Discussing the results, we state that extending explanatory variables and focusing on causal mechanisms is a good agenda for further research.