Work

Digital propaganda via social media and perceived democratic debate in the digital public sphere: evidence from Jordanian journalists during the 2024 Jordanian parliamentary elections

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: This study examines how platform-specific digital election propaganda is associated with Jordanian journalists’ evaluations of democratic debate in the digital public sphere concerning the 2024 Jordanian parliamentary election. The framework integrates digital-public-sphere theory, platform affordances and network media logic, connective action, and affective-publics theory. Perceived richness of democratic debate is represented by three related evaluative components: rational-deliberative quality, affective-inclusive communication, and a global criterion, each measured with seven-point multi-item scales informed by the Discourse Quality Index and online-deliberation research. Construct validation included exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, reliability assessment, convergent and discriminant validity, common-method diagnostics, ordinal bivariate tests, multivariate decomposition with demographic controls, subgroup comparisons, and platform-specific models. The analytic dataset comprised 340 complete cases. Facebook and WhatsApp had the highest exposure levels. The seven-factor measurement model demonstrated excellent fit (CFI = .992, TLI = .991, RMSEA = .014, SRMR = .039). Dialogic affordances were positively associated with rational-deliberative quality (Spearman rho = .498, p < .001); active engagement and affective-inclusive communication were positively associated with the global richness criterion (rho = .454 and.309, respectively, p < .001); and active engagement was associated with campaign influence (rho = .437, p < .001). The rational-deliberative by affective-inclusive interaction was not significant. A hierarchical decomposition model accounted for 46.4% of the variance in the global criterion. Because the criterion and the dimension-level scores belong to the same perceptual construct family, this value is interpreted descriptively rather than as evidence of an independent causal mechanism.

Source: Frontiers in Communication

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1901418