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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.

This study focuses on the emerging practices of social mobilisation via social media in Bulgaria. Most studies on this topics have so far ignored the countries of the post-socialist block, which, similarly to elsewhere around the globe, saw a wave of protests between 2011-2014, spurred by disillusionment with the reality of the “Transition”. Social movement studies in general have hardly been applied to the dissident movements or their legacy in Eastern Europe, but instead activism in the region has been mainly studied from a “civil society” perspective, which has suffered from a too narrow definition and problematic normative theoretical assumptions that often “de-politicise” its aims. This thesis addresses some of these gaps and conceptual problems in order to try to broaden our understanding of the role social media (can) play for contentious politics, and by extension democracy, in new democracies like Bulgaria. I take the view that in considering social media and its relations with contentious politics we are interested in social change (Fenton 2016). However, assuming that the latter is necessarily envisioned in radical democratic or progressive terms ignores cases where that is not the case, as well as the anti-democratic tendencies that can arise from the political use of social media. Drawing on radical democratic theory (Mouffe 1992 2009) and the notion of “uncivil society” Kopecky and Mudde (2003), my conceptualisation of civil society thus envisages theoretically, and assess empirically, a wider range and forms of civic association and mobilisation. By focusing on the social media practices in context of groups of civic actors from different ideological backgrounds, organisational structures and with different political agendas, I conceptualise social media as a contested public “space” where different manifestations of the (often polarised) Bulgarian civil society appear in a hegemonic struggle - one that is at the same time between actual citizen groups, and between idea(s) or discourse(s) about the meaning of “democratic citizenship”. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with activists and content and discourse analysis of social media communication pertaining to different protest mobilisations, I explore the complexities, the contested legitimacy and unclear political representation relating to different civil society actors and the role played by social media in their struggle for trust, visibility, recognition, and legitimacy. I also consider the wider democratic implications by interrogating sweeping claims about the democratic potential of social media and their affinity to participatory grassroots and/or populist politics.

Net neutrality is a hotly debated and contested policy for broadband Internet access provision. In principle, net neutrality prescribes no discrimination by the type or size of data packet exchanged over the Internet. This principle has fostered innovation and economic growth. The non-discriminatory principle ingrained in Internet architecture has also made it the ultimate platform for convergence of technology, business and service. However, the content, businesses and services that the Internet supports, particularly rich content such as online audio-visual services, are pushing the existing Internet network infrastructure to its limits. The imbalance of growing demands for bandwidth and relatively static supply of network capacity has sparked a policy debate over network management principles for Internet access provision. The interdependent yet competing interests of network and content providers and all levels of convergence taking place on the Internet make net neutrality policymaking extremely challenging. To explain emerging net neutrality policies in the US and UK, this research examines the net neutrality policymaking process based on the understanding that the process is both structured and actor-driven. Treating policymaking as a communicative process, it identifies as the research data the formal communication and policy actors’ accounts of their informal communication during the policymaking process. An analytical framework that emphasises the interaction between structural factors and policy actors is then applied to both sets of data. This research argues in support of the position that net neutrality policies, like other polices, are communicative, structured and actor-driven. The challenges in developing net neutrality policy and policy measures result from the convergence of transmission infrastructure and content, and the interdependent yet competing values and interests underpinning the provision and consumption of these services.

The year 2008 witnessed an explosion of online Chinese nationalism, triggered by a series of incidents relating to the Beijing Olympics. In this thesis, I mainly examine the significance and relevance of the internet to the studies of Chinese nationalism, and investigate the extent to which the internet can contribute to the shaping of Chinese nationalism in contemporary Chinese society. I treat online Chinese nationalism as discursive, because the production of online nationalist information, the construction of online nationalist identities and the discussion of online nationalist actions, are all discursive practices which are intrinsically related to the political use of language. Therefore, I argue that the study of online Chinese nationalism should entail critical linguistic analysis of the online texts that discuss Chinese nationalism. Rather than seeing nationalist texts as sheer expressions of nationalist concerns or claims, I am interested in how nationalist texts are made linguistically, and see linguistic features, structures and organisations of the texts as clues for unveiling the underlying nationalist ideologies and power relations. I mainly focus on the online popular discourse of Chinese nationalism, however, since research on nationalism can hardly avoid the power relations between the state and popular nationalist players, I also shed significant light on the official nationalist discourse. To carry out the research, I examine the official newspaper The People’s Daily and the non-official online media the Tianya Forum. By doing this, I intend to find out how the official and online popular nationalist players shaped and reshaped Chinese nationalism through media discourses during the time of the international torch relay of the Beijing Olympics. Moreover, by taking both the official and online popular nationalist discourses into consideration, it also allows me to examine the possible tension and co-optation between both nationalist players, and investigate to what extent online Chinese nationalism as an alternative nationalist discourse, challenges the domination of the state over the politics of Chinese nationalism. To analyse the discourses of Chinese nationalism, I employ Norman Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis as the ultimate research method of the thesis.