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Theoretical and empirical research into online politics to date has primarily focused on what might be called formal politics or on how activists and social movements utilize social media to pursue their goals. However, in this chapter, we argue that there is much to be gained by investigating how political talk and engagement emerges in everyday, online, lifestyle communities: i.e. third spaces. Such spaces are not intended for political purposes, but rather – during the course of everyday talk – become political through the connections people make between their everyday lives and the political/social issues of the day. In this chapter, we develop a theoretically informed argument for research that focuses on everyday informal political talk in online third spaces.

The advent of social media in politics has changed the relationship between political journalists and politicians. Especially Twitter has developed into a regular news beat. Journalists use it to build relationships with politicians and quote their tweets in coverage. For many politicians, tweeting has become a common practice to communicate their viewpoints and to influence public debate by bypassing the news media. Building on previous research on both journalism content and practice, this chapter analyses how social media are impacting political journalism and the power relations between reporters and politicians.

We track the social media activity of the two main campaigns in the Scottish independence referendum, Yes Scotland (YS) and Better Together (BT), by monitoring their respective Facebook and Twitter accounts on weekdays from August 2013 until the referendum vote in September 2014. We explore the relationship between key events and online support and find that the Yes Scotland campaign pulled ahead of the Better Together campaign in terms of online enthusiasm (especially following the launch of the White Paper in November 2013), and that it accelerated exponentially in the closing weeks of the campaign as a number of events helped give it an advantage. Although further research is needed, it is interesting to note how this transformation in mobilisation online for Yes preceded big movements in support offline in the closing weeks.