Spiral of Silence 2.0: a Study of Facebook Use in Turkey

This study investigates behaviour and attitude of Facebook users when they feel their political views are in opposition to the majority within the framework of spiral of silence theory proposed by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. Data was obtained through questionnaires done by 404 Facebook users sampled by snowball technique. Frequency, Pearson correlation, factor analysis and dependent samples T test were done in order to resolve and interpret data. As a result, the study found out positive correlations among feeling minority, frequency to change privacy settings, fear to comment, and expressing political views better than offline. In addition, there are positive correlations among feeling to have high level of political information, level of political information and participation and finding Facebook useful to express political views. As a consequence, data obtained demonstrates that there is spiral of silence on facebook considered to enrich democracy and civic society