A digital coffeehouse? Exploring the longitudinal Twitter discussion surrounding the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union

This thesis seeks to longitudinally assess the quality of public debate within the Twitter discussion of Brexit, undertaken through a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative measures, as well as human coded and computational elements. To undertake this research, a corpus of N=450,000 tweets have been retrospectively gathered across four years, from February 2016 until February 2020, allowing my research to draw conclusions based upon trends across time. The theoretical framework is predominantly informed by Habermas’s public sphere theory, which establishes the basis for my empirical research. Specifically, I argue that quality public debate should be free from polarisation and distortions in power relations, being an accessible space that promotes rational discussion that aids in the formation of informed public opinion.

Within the literature review, I demonstrate that the EU referendum suffered from a deliberative deficit, which may have negatively impacted discussion on the platform and challenged the legitimacy of the 2016 referendum result. Through the empirical findings, I then highlight several issues that constrain Twitter’s ability to facilitate healthy public debate within the context of the UK-EU discussion, with several measures pointing to a long-term decrease in the quality of the conversation. However, a number of the empirical findings are highly nuanced, which may reflect the complex nature of political discussion on the platform Twitter. In presenting the empirical findings, this thesis challenges previously held assumptions about the UK-EU discussion on Twitter, as well as contributes to new understandings regarding the quality of contentious political debate on the platform.