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Social media platform affordances allow users to interact with content and with each other in diverse ways. For example, on Twitter,¹users can like, reply, retweet, or quote another tweet. Though it’s clear that these different features allow various types of interactions, open questions remain about how these different affordances shape the conversations. We examine how two similar, but distinct conversational features on Twitter — specifically reply vs. quote — are used differently. Focusing on the polarized discourse around Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony in July 2019, we look at how these features are employed in conversations between politically aligned and opposed accounts. We use a mixed methods approach, employing grounded qualitative analysis to identify the different conversational and framing strategies salient in that discourse and then quantitatively analyzing how those techniques differed across the different features and political alignments. Our research (1) demonstrates that the quote feature is more often used to broadcast and reply is more often used to reframe the conversation; (2) identifies the different framing strategies that emerge through the use of these features when engaging with politically aligned vs. opposed accounts; (3) discusses how reply and quote features may be re-designed to reduce the adversarial tone of polarized conversations on Twitter-like platforms. 

Online extremism can quickly spill over into the physical world and have dangerous consequences, as when rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. While information and communication technologies have enabled extremists to plan and organize violent events, they have also enabled collective action by others to identify the perpetrators and hold them accountable. Through a mixed-methods case study of Sedition Hunters, a Twitter-based community whose goal is to identify individuals who took part in the Capitol attack, we explore: 1) how the community formed and changed over time; 2) the motives, ethos, and roles of its members; and 3) the methods and software tools they used to identify individuals and coordinate their activities. 

Misinformation poses a threat to public health, safety, and democracy. Training novices to debunk visual misinformation with image verification techniques has shown promise, yet little is known about how novices do so in the wild, and what methods prove effective. Thus, we studied 225 verification challenges posted by experts on Twitter over one year with the aim of improving novices’ skills. We collected, annotated, and analyzed these challenges and over 3,100 replies by 304 unique participants. We find that novices employ multiple tools and approaches, and techniques like collaboration and reverse image search significantly improve performance.