Slacktivist USA and Authoritarian China? Comparing Two Political Public Spheres with a Random Sample of Social Media Users

The rise of social media has put back on the agenda questions about the Internet’s potential as an online public sphere, particularly in authoritarian states. However, random samples have never been employed to investigate political speech on social media, necessarily limiting knowledge. This article presents an analysis of political speech based on a random sample of more than 1,000 active US Twitter users and Chinese Weibo users collected in late 2014. Political speech by ordinary users was found to be more frequent on both platforms than expected – 9.4% on Weibo and 6.8% on Twitter - lending support to hopes of an online public sphere. However, existing powerholders make up around a fifth of US Twitter accounts, and political speech acts by ordinary US Twitter users are largely “slacktivist” in nature. In contrast, 98% of active accounts on Weibo belong to ordinary users, with active political speech making up more than one in fifty posts by these users. Although they largely fall within the bounds of what is permitted by the Chinese state, these findings point to the potential of the Internet as a (limited) public sphere in China, while raising questions about its contribution to political processes in the United States.