What makes an ideal participant of social media political discussions?
One only needs to log in to services such as X or BlueSky to see that one prominent way of using social media is to discuss politics with peers. Yet both academic literature and popular discourse suggest that political discussion is far from ideal in the social media space. Concerns regarding harassment and polarization are just a few of the problems people relate to online interactions.
Together with my co-authors, we began to wonder if the current situation is far from perfect, what exactly would be considered ideal? Or what makes an ideal participant in political debate? We delved into this topic by analyzing design interviews where we asked participants how social media should be redesigned to support political interactions.
Our attempt to understand what an ideal participant could mean in the context of political social media discussions culminated in a recent article published at the 2025 Designing Interactive Systems conference. Our approach in the study was based on the idea that we can identify rules defining these ideals by analysing interviews. This method was inspired by work in social psychology and sociology on roles and rules, especially by classic contributions of Rom Harré and Paul Secord.
Our analysis led us to identify four qualities for ideal online discussants and three for the audience.
The ideal qualities for a discussant were:
Being committed to moving the discussion forward instead of participating for personal status.
Demonstrating competence in the discussion.
Being sincere about their thoughts.
Being accountable for their behavior.
The ideal traits for the audience were:
Seeking out discussions featuring those who fit the ideal-discussant role.
Striving to avoid strengthening their pre-existing views.
Rewarding or punishing those who align with or contradict the ideal-discussant roles, respectively.
A striking insight found in the interviews was the prevalence of the belief that strong verification would be useful in curbing unwanted conduct. Verification emerged as a method for ascertaining accountability for one’s actions in social media. It was presented as a method for making antisocial actions truly consequential for “trolls” and other improperly behaving individuals.
While our sample was relatively homogeneous, there was still variance regarding what constitutes the ideal roles. With more pluralist data, there would no doubt have been even more tensions. An example of variance in our interviews was the differing opinions regarding how competence should be expressed. One perspective emphasized trustworthy credentials that validated the discussant's expertise. The alternative view focused on demonstrating competence by one’s argumentative skills.
The variance that resides in different conceptualisations of ideals raises important questions for designing discussion spaces for politics. In such a design, some idea of “good” discussion is always present. However, whose version of “good” is it in the end? Decisions between competing valuations of what is “good” or “proper” are inevitable when designing for interactions between humans.
This post is based on the following publication:
Haapoja, J., Epp, F. A., Hasala, I., & Nelimarkka, M. (2025). Ideal Online Discussant and Audience: Understanding Political Social Media through Roles and Rules. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1710–1724). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735705