Social media has instituted new parameters for the political conversation in the digital public sphere. Previous research had identified several of these new phenomena: political polarisation, hate speech discourses, and fake news, among others. However, little attention has been paid to the users’ geographical location, specifically to the role location plays in political discussion on social media, and to its further implications in the digital public sphere. A priori, we might think that on the digital landscape geographical restrictions no longer condition political debate, allowing increasingly diverse users to participate in, and influence, the discussion. To analyse this, machine learning techniques were used to study Twitter’s political conversation about the negotiation process for the formation of the government in Spain that took place between 2015 and 2016. A big data sample of 127,3 million tweets associated with three Spanish cities (Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia) was used. The results show that the geographical location of the users directly affects the political conversation on Twitter, despite the dissolution of the physical restrictions that the online environment favours. Demographics, cultural factors, and proximity to the centres of political power are factors conditioning the structure of digital political debate. These findings are a novel contribution to the design of more effective political campaigns and strategies, and provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the digital public sphere provided by Twitter.

中文翻译：

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数字公共领域和地理：地理位置对Twitter政治对话的影响

社交媒体为数字公共领域的政治对话建立了新的参数。先前的研究已经发现了其中的几种新现象：政治两极分化，仇恨言论和假新闻等等。但是，很少关注用户的地理位置，特别是位置在社交媒体的政治讨论中所扮演的角色，以及它在数字公共领域中的进一步影响。先验地，我们可能认为在数字景观方面，地理限制不再限制政治辩论，而使越来越多的用户参与并影响讨论。为了对此进行分析，机器学习技术被用来研究Twitter关于2015年至2016年间在西班牙成立政府的谈判过程的政治对话。与西班牙三个城市（马德里，巴塞罗那，西班牙，和巴伦西亚）。结果表明，尽管取消了在线环境所支持的物理限制，但用户的地理位置直接影响着Twitter上的政治对话。人口统计学，文化因素以及与政治权力中心的接近性是制约数字政治辩论结构的因素。这些发现对设计更有效的政治运动和策略做出了新的贡献，