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The Spiral Of Silence In Virtual Space: Examining How Expert Participation, Digital Media Form, And Opinion Congruency Relate To Opinion Expression, Yiwei Zhang
LSU Master's Theses
This study tested the spiral of silence in both Social Networking Sites (SNS) and online discussion forums. It argued that online expert participation may influence people's willingness to take part in an online discussion. A two (opinion climate) by two (expert participation) experiment was designed to examine how expert participation influenced the relationship between people’s willingness to speak out and opinion climate with the controversial topic: abortion. In this study, the spiral of silence effect was only found when experts were present in the discussion.