Online comments and the public sphere: practices from Cuban authoritarianism

Abstract

Within the social transformation that shapes human relations mediated by technologies, the comments to online news result in one of the strategies to approach citizenship as a news source and, in addition, as a core of appreciation of popular sentiment on certain issues that affect the integrity of a State. In that case, the present research focuses on analyzing the online comments posted during the constitutional referendum held in Cuba during the last semester of 2018, in order to provide an academic corpus that characterizes the interactions that happen on the Web and how that activity reproduces the idea of a virtual public sphere. To evaluate the effectiveness of readers' comment forums as a new public sphere, we focused on two alternative digital platforms, Cubadebate and Oncuba, and qualitative content analysis, accompanied by stalking observation, was used as a method. The concept of authoritarian public sphere was reconstructed and three dimensions proposed by Poor (2005) for the analysis of the digital public sphere were applied, detecting segments of communication accentuated in a politically admissible debate, which in the case at hand simulated the construction of this public space.