Spiral of Silence 2.0 : Impression Management and Political Self-Censorsip on Facebook

Do social media strengthen or weaken citizen's political participation? Authors have found that, while lowering the cost of political engagement, social media may also foster the fragmentation of audiences and contribute to an increasingly polarized political discourse. This study applies the "spiral of silence" theory to political discourse among digital natives on the social networking platform Facebook. We hypothesize that users perceiving their online network as politically heterogeneous will be more likely to engage in self-censorship and limit their political self-expression. Previous studies have found that impression management, i.e., communication behaviour geared towards projecting a socially desirable self, increases engagement in online social networks. Accordingly, we hypothesize that users geared towards impression management will be more engaged in online political discourse. We test these hypotheses based on a survey among German Facebook users under the age of 30 and find that network heterogeneity does indeed increase political self-censorship while impression management increases users' willingness to speak out.