Online opinion formation has received much scholarly attention since the mass proliferation of social networks. Inter alia, online opinions have been viewed as a new part of public deliberation. However, the pre-Internet era's vision on deliberation imposes extremely high demands on users as deliberators. We argue that opinion formation online neither pursues the goals nor follows the rules of institutionalized consensus-oriented round-table deliberative processes. Moreover, the growing academic evidence shows that opinion formation online is predominantly cumulative, not deliberative in nature. Thus, we introduce the concept of cumulative deliberation as an alternative and addition to classic institutional deliberation and argue that it describes opinion formation online more precisely. Importantly, it allows for two crucial additions to the deliberation theory, which are the use of systemic approaches to measuring and predicting public opinion and new normativity that sees a user as an initially neutral discussion unit. It also allows for healthier distinction between “natural” user communication and intentional counter-deliberative distortions in online communication, like computational propaganda or cyberbullying. We end up with suggesting a research agenda on cumulative deliberation.

中文翻译：

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累积审议的概念：将系统方法与更健康的规范性联系起来，以评估在线讨论中的意见形成

自社交网络大规模普及以来，在线舆论形成受到了学术界的广泛关注。除其他外，在线意见已被视为公众审议的新组成部分。然而，前互联网时代的协商愿景对作为协商者的用户提出了极高的要求。我们认为，网上舆论形成既不追求目标，也不遵循制度化的以共识为导向的圆桌审议过程的规则。此外，越来越多的学术证据表明，网上意见的形成主要是累积的，而不是深思熟虑的。因此，我们引入累积审议的概念作为经典制度审议的替代和补充，并认为它更准确地描述了在线意见的形成。重要的是，它允许对审议理论进行两个关键的补充，即使用系统方法来衡量和预测公众舆论以及将用户视为最初中立的讨论单位的新规范。它还可以更健康地区分“自然”用户交流和在线交流中故意的反协商扭曲，例如计算宣传或网络欺凌。我们最终提出了一个关于累积审议的研究议程。