X Hashtag Discussions during Electoral Campaign in Lebanon: Catalysts for a Public Sphere or Seeds of Elitism, Fragmentation, and Polarization?
Abstract
The use of Hashtags in political discussion on X has become paramount in any political event, specifically in electoral campaigns. The Hashtag tool on X has allowed anchoring messages within a thematic context, enhancing visibility and propagation of electoral content while enabling conversations among strangers and facilitating ordinary users to participate. This article aims to assess whether political discussions on X during electoral campaigns can forge a public sphere or instead reproduce traditional elitist closed networks, as well as fragmented and polarized online debate spaces, thereby extending public sphere theory to Middle Eastern hybrid media systems. The methodology consists of network and content analyses based on the Hashtag انتخابات_لبنان# (Lebanese elections) during the Lebanese legislative elections of 2018. Results revealed that elites, such as journalists, political experts, politicians control discussions with a low presence of influential ordinary users, resulting in limited inclusivity within the network. The network analysis also identified multiple opposing clusters within it, leading to fragmentation but not isolation, as certain communities still communicated with each other. The content analysis of tweets indicated that counterproductive posts predominate in online political debates, which harms the quality of exchanges and the formation of a public sphere. While a digital public sphere exists, it remains incomplete and limited. The main factors contributing to this état des lieux are algorithms and AI, the Lebanese political and media systems, and the lack of media literacy. Although these aspects are often regarded as the culprits, if enhanced, they might as well serve as potential solutions.
Keywords: Social media, hashtags, public sphere, political communication, algorithms.
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