Affording Extremes: Incivility, Social Media and Democracy in the Indian Context

In this mixed-methods study of political discourse, we study the affordances of Twitter in the context of free speech in India. We critically examine specific cases of the legal prosecution of free speech and the use of extreme speech in attacks on people to document the risks to citizens when they engage in antagonistic online discourse, particularly against the state or political institutions. We follow this up with quantitative study of the use of extreme speech through 477 hashtags used by a random sample of thousand political actors on Twitter and find that politicians are rewarded, through higher retweet rates, when they engage in extreme or uncivil messaging. We contextualize these findings to the postcolonial history of India and the laws and institutions that enable differential consequences for engaging in various forms of speech. In conclusion, we propose that the affordances of new ICTs like social media need to be carefully considered for their unintended consequences, and that functional access to free speech may differ dramatically based on one’s access to institutions.