“This is a small town, you can’t hide behind fake names for too long”

Community responses to the challenges of the local public sphere

Abstract

Negativity and manipulation on social media platforms have become prominent topics in academic and public discourse over the past decade; however, their local manifestations and impacts have received relatively little research attention so far. An important question is how the more personal and close-knit public spheres of smaller settlements face these challenges and what responses they develop. This study presents the results of digital ethnographic research conducted in four Hungarian settlements of varying sizes and different political and social contexts. Based on online observation and semi-structured interviews, the research aims to provide a deeper understanding of how deception and negativity appear in local-level online discourse, how locals perceive these phenomena, and how they try to counteract them.

Our findings show that, as at other levels, strong negativity and attempts at deception characterize the local public sphere as well, while we also observed several phenomena differing from the national level. The personal nature of smaller settlements indeed reduces the presence of these issues; however, in larger towns this leads to personal information appearing in public conversations. As a result, many participants tend to engage only as observers in local online discussions. At the local level, deception primarily involves fake profiles, whose perception is ambivalent: while disruptive trolls are regarded as harmful by locals, the use of fake profiles for self-protection is considered acceptable. The latter is justified by stronger dependency relationships and frequent personal attacks on social media. Both users and moderators actively try to counter these disruptive phenomena, for example by identifying profiles they consider harmful or trolls, or by drawing attention to false information and fake profiles.