With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how much of the theory of a Habermassian public sphere is still applicable to social media? Drawing on Twitter data collected on April 16, 2017, during the night of Turkey’s 2017 Constitutional Referendum, we test whether the networks of political communication resemble the communicative structures characteristic of Habermas’s “public sphere.” The referendum left the country sharply divided; 51.4 percent of the electorate voted in favor of amending the constitution to grant sweeping new executive powers to the presidency, with an overall turnout of 85.46 percent. In this article, we examine whether Twitter users were meaningfully engaged on the night of the referendum, and if their communicative patterns resembled a networked public sphere, that is, a space where information and ideas are exchanged, and public opinion is formed in a deliberative, rational manner. We find ideological uniformity, polarization, and partisan antipathy to be especially evident—mirroring existing social tensions in Turkey. Rather than resembling a public sphere, we found Twitter users to be more likely to communicate on the basis of homophily—rather than to engage in democratic debate or establish a common ground between the two campaigns.

中文翻译：

---

哈贝马斯理想的终结？2017年土耳其宪法公投期间Twitter上的政治传播

随着对自动机器人程序帐户，虚假新闻和回声室的关注日益增加，哈贝马斯公共领域的理论中有多少仍然适用于社交媒体？利用2017年4月16日土耳其2017年宪法公投之夜收集的Twitter数据，我们测试了政治传播网络是否类似于哈贝马斯“公共领域”的传播结构。公民投票使该国急剧分裂。51.4％的选民投票赞成修改宪法，以赋予总统广泛的新行政权力，总投票率为85.46％。在本文中，我们研究了Twitter用户是否在全民投票之夜有意义地参与其中，以及他们的交流方式是否类似于网络化的公共领域，也就是说，一个交流信息和思想并以协商，理性的方式形成舆论的空间。我们发现意识形态上的统一，两极分化和党派的反感特别明显，这反映了土耳其现有的社会紧张局势。我们发现Twitter用户与其类似公共领域，不如在同质的基础上进行交流，而不是进行民主辩论或在这两个活动之间建立共同点。