Dissidents versus allegiants on Facebook: an examination of Facebook page networks related to Channel 4 war crime videos on Sri Lanka

This study takes a network analysis perspective to understand communities of dissidents and allegiants formed on Facebook in relation to Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict. Networks representing dissidents and allegiants were formed based on levels of liking and commenting and analyzed across ethnic groups. The results show that the dissident network is more diverse in terms of ethnic composition and has a significantly higher number of commenters than the allegiant network, suggesting greater engagement, and is neither assortative nor disassortaive across ethnicity, suggesting the presence of cross-ethnicity interaction. The study suggests that Facebook can help create issue-based communities where people from opposing viewpoints co-exist and perhaps interact, and examines how the nature of engagement in both networks reflects the nature of the related political issue offline.