Peripheral publics and digital participation: deliberation in Northeast India's news media

Research design

The study adopts a mixed-method approach combining descriptive mapping of participation intensity with qualitative interpretation of audience interaction. The design enables both the measurement of engagement levels and the analysis of communicative meaning. This reflects the interactional dimension of the public sphere that views participation as an everyday communicative practice rather than a numerical aggregate (Dahlgren, 2009).

Four English-language digital-native news media, namely East Mojo, Inside Northeast, News Mill, and Raiot, were purposively selected. These platforms represent the most active and regionally recognised news initiatives in Northeast India. They are distinguished by a consistent publishing frequency and considerable social media following, mainly on Facebook. They are associated with the Northeast Association of Digital Communication and Media, a regional association of digital media organisations established to promote professional collaboration and ethical standards. Together, these outlets offer a balanced cross-section of commercial, civic, and activist orientations within the region's digital news ecology.

Facebook served as the empirical site because it is the dominant medium of news discovery and audience interaction in India. The India Digital News Report 2019 found that more than three-quarters of Indian internet users access news primarily through Facebook, establishing the platform as a primary arena of mediated participation (Aneez et al., 2019). For small-scale newsrooms in the Northeast, Facebook functions simultaneously as infrastructure, public forum, and feedback mechanism, providing the most accurate representation of how audiences encounter and respond to regional news. While Facebook serves as the primary empirical site for this study, it is important to note that platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram also play a significant role in news circulation and everyday communication in India. Facebook was selected because it remains one of the principal platforms for news consumption and public interaction. According to the India Digital News Report, more than three-quarters of Indian internet users access news through Facebook, making it a particularly relevant site for examining visible forms of audience engagement and discussion (Aneez et al., 2019). However, due to their limited public accessibility and challenges of systematic data collection, WhatsApp and Instagram are not included in the present analysis.

Sampling and data source

The dataset comprised Facebook posts linking to opinion and commentary articles published by the four outlets during the formative consolidation phase of the region's digital-native news ecosystem (2018–2020). This period marks the stage when regional outlets stabilised editorial operations, and audience interaction became integral to their distribution model. It also precedes the implementation of India's 2021 Information-Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, allowing analysis of civic participation in its pre-regulatory form. Studying this window, therefore, offers a reliable baseline for understanding the natural evolution of audience engagement before state regulation reshaped the digital environment.

From a corpus of 434 opinion articles, 279 (64.28%) were political and 155 (35.71%) general in focus. Within the political subset, 191 (68.45%) addressed Northeast-specific issues, of which immigration emerged as the most recurrent theme (35.07%). This empirical dominance made immigration an analytically suitable entry point for tracing audience participation and understanding how publics in the region engage with contentious issues of identity and belonging. Opinion writing was selected because it represents the most direct form of discursive journalism, inviting reader response and debate. In public sphere theory, deliberation emerges not merely through information consumption but through reflexive discourse (Dahlgren, 2009; Habermas, 1991). Opinion and commentary pieces embody this deliberative impulse by framing issues in evaluative terms that encourage readers to contest or affirm positions. Within the study corpus, themes such as governance, identity, and citizenship recurred frequently, making these texts a productive entry point into regional civic communication.

Analytical procedure

The analysis was conducted in two stages. First, a quantitative mapping of engagement metrics, including likes, shares, and comments, was conducted to identify overall interaction patterns across outlets. These figures established participation intensity and revealed uneven audience attention. Descriptive statistics were sufficient for this purpose, as the aim was to illustrate tendencies rather than produce inferential comparisons. Second, a qualitative analysis examined the content and tone of reader comments. Comments were treated as communicative units revealing interpretive and affective orientations.

Using Entman's (1993) four framing functions, namely problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and proposed remedy. The analysis coded how audiences constructed meaning around issues. Each comment was further categorised by communicative style that included expressive (emotion-driven) or deliberative (reason-driven or dialogic). Multi-user exchanges were read as interactional sequences indicative of emergent micro-publics (Keane, 2018). To maintain interpretive rigour, coding categories were refined through iterative reading. Attention was given to context, irony, vernacular expression, and affective tone. The goal was not numerical generalisation but the identification of discursive patterns showing how publics negotiate meaning under infrastructural constraint.

Ethics and reflexivity

The study used publicly available Facebook data without accessing private information or identifiable user profiles. No attempt was made to contact participants, and only aggregated engagement counts and anonymised excerpts were recorded. Consistent with institutional ethics policy, the dataset involved minimal risk and did not require formal consent because all material was public. Nevertheless, identifying details were removed to preserve anonymity. Reflexively, the researcher acknowledges that digital traces reflect both human and algorithmic agency. These limitations are integral to the study's interpretive stance, which treats online engagement not as objective evidence of deliberation but as a mediated signal of civic presence.

Scope and limitations

The research focuses exclusively on English-language Facebook content from four regional outlets and does not extend to vernacular media or other platforms. This scope allows analytical depth but limits generalisability across linguistic publics. Additionally, Facebook's interface changes and algorithmic opacity mean that engagement counts are approximations of visibility rather than precise measures of participation. Despite these constraints, the dataset provides a robust and contextually rich portrait of how citizens in a historically marginal region use digital platforms to articulate identity, critique, and civic voice.

Patterns of reader participation

The overall participation on the Facebook pages of the four digital-native outlets was modest in volume yet unevenly distributed. Quantitative mapping of 434 commentaries revealed that most commentaries on immigration attracted limited visible engagement. More than three-quarters recorded no reader comments, and over ninety per cent registered fewer than fifty shares. Only a small minority achieved higher visibility, producing isolated peaks in reactions and shares. Table 1 summarises these engagement trends.

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Table 1.

Summary of engagement on Facebook posts about immigration (2018–2020).

Engagement indicator	Range / category	Posts (%)	Observations
Comments	None (0)	75.64%	Most posts had no reader comments
	1–9	21.37%	Light interaction
	≥ 10	2.99%	Few posts generated extended dialogue
Shares	< 50	92.53%	Limited circulation
	≥ 50	7.47%	Few viral outliers
Likes / Reactions	< 100	95.52%	Low overall visibility
	≥ 100	4.48%	Sporadic peaks (max ≈ 645 likes)
Mean per article	—	—	Comments 1.85 Shares 16 Likes 40.6

Source: Author's dataset (2018–2020).

While a large majority of posts (75.64%) attracted no comments, this absence of visible dialogue should not be read as civic indifference. As Dahlgren (2009) notes, accessibility of participatory platforms rarely guarantees deliberation, where structural and cultural barriers often suppress contribution. In the Northeast, infrastructural disparities ranging from bandwidth instability to small newsroom capacity continue to restrict sustained discussion (Baruah, 2020; Thomas, 2021).

The remaining quarter of posts that did attract engagement demonstrate that publics respond selectively to topics of emotional or identity resonance. Posts relating to the questions of belonging, ethnicity, and recognition, including the CAA, cross-border migration, and representations of Northeastern migrants in metropolitan India, elicited higher reactions and shares. Comments blended critique with affirmation. Some users defended regional integrity and cultural distinction, others invoked solidarity with affected communities or criticised political exclusion. These selective bursts of attention reveal that affective triggers, rather than information alone, drive participation. Many comments reflected concerns around identity and demographic change, often expressed through brief and affective statements such as ‘We stand together’. These episodic yet intense activities illustrate what Keane (2018) calls micro-publics. Small, issue-specific clusters of deliberation that appear and dissolve rapidly within networked environments. Participation in these comment spaces, though limited in scale, constitutes a symbolic affirmation of civic presence and community.

Expressive and deliberative interaction

Qualitative coding of 124 reader comments indicated that expressive communication overwhelmingly dominated. Most were brief affective statements like approval, irony, anger, humour, or sarcasm rather than extended reasoning. Users often employed emotive language to express frustration, pride, or irony. For instance, comments such as ‘This is the only way to destroy Northeast’ reflect anxieties around identity and demographic change. Others criticised governance through statements like ‘The state has failed to protect its own people’.

A smaller proportion of comments displayed deliberative tendencies. Of the 124 comments analysed, approximately 20% reflected deliberative engagement. These included responses that questioned policy implications or offered comparative reasoning. For example, some users asked why similar migration issues are treated differently across states, pointing to inconsistencies in implementation. Such responses often drew on factual examples, policy references, or personal experience, and sometimes evolved into short exchanges among readers. While most comments appeared as isolated interventions, these occasional exchanges indicate repeated engagement by a small subset of users within otherwise low-participation environments. In one thread, a user questioned the accuracy of a post's statistics, prompting clarification and further sharing of sources – micro-moments of reasoning within emotive discourse. These interactional sequences exemplify Keane's (1995, 2018) micro-publics, informal but meaningful arenas of everyday dialogue. Though numerically few, these deliberative comments are analytically significant because they show that reasoning and emotion coexist rather than exclude one another.

This hybrid pattern affirms Dahlgren's (2009) view that public engagement is sustained through small communicative gestures. Even minimal actions such as liking, reacting, or brief commenting constitute symbolic acts of belonging. This interpretation is supported by scholarship on digital participation, which suggests that even minimal online actions signal presence and affiliation within networked publics (Papacharissi, 2015). In peripheral contexts with limited infrastructural access, these expressions represent participation under constraint rather than its absence.

Framing patterns and meaning construction

Using Entman's (1993) framework, the analysis examined how readers constructed meaning around immigration through four interrelated framing functions. This included problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and proposed remedy that together form integrated framing packages. Across reader comments, the dominant frame depicted immigration as a threat to regional identity and security. The problem was defined culturally. Fears of demographic change and cultural erosion outweighed economic or administrative concerns. Causal interpretations blamed porous borders, central neglect, or the manipulation of migration for electoral gain. Moral evaluations carried intense affective charge, invoking betrayal, injustice, and lost autonomy, an emotional vocabulary that displaced policy reasoning. For instance, many comments framed immigration in terms of cultural threat and loss of identity. One commenter argued that ‘protecting the culture and heritage of the local small minority tribe is the most important issue here’, while others expressed concern about indigenous communities ‘becoming minority’ in their own states. Such responses framed immigration as a question of cultural survival and demographic security rather than policy design or administrative implementation.

Cross-checking deductive categories with inductive readings of audience discourse revealed further complexity. Many users extended the threat narrative into assertions of collective pride and self-protection, while others reframed immigration as evidence of the Northeast's marginalisation within the Indian nation-state. A smaller group introduced humanitarian or coexistence perspectives, emphasising empathy and historical interdependence. These variations show that the public did not simply echo journalistic frames but re-embedded them in lived experiences of belonging, insecurity, and justice. The coexistence of defensive and empathetic framings underscores the moral and emotional diversity of public reasoning.

Overall, the audience's framing practices were morally expressive and identity driven rather than technocratic. Here, technocratic responses refer to comments focused on administrative procedures, legal frameworks, or policy implementation rather than moral or identity-based evaluations. The predominance of evaluative language indicates that publics engage through moral judgment more than policy analysis. Such tendencies are consistent with broader online communication patterns (Chong and Druckman, 2007; De Vreese, 2005). Yet the emergence of counter-frames, particularly humanitarian and coexistence perspectives, demonstrates interpretive agency. These alternative readings align with Fraser's (1992) idea of counter-public reasoning, through which marginal voices articulate dissent within dominant discourse. Even brief reframings expand deliberation beyond echo chambers, illustrating how peripheral publics in the Northeast negotiate intertwined questions of identity, security, and justice within mediated space.

Platform and outlet variations

Engagement patterns varied among outlets, reflecting differences in editorial focus and audience expectation. East Mojo and News Mill generated comparatively higher reactions, aided by multimedia use and broader coverage. Inside Northeast showed sharp but short-lived comment spikes, often linked to political controversies. Raiot, with its activist and reflective tone, hosted fewer posts but longer and more dialogic comment threads that occasionally included author–reader exchanges.

These contrasts confirm that the communicative ecology of each outlet shapes its public. Here, communicative ecology refers to the combination of editorial orientation, audience composition, platform practices, and issue focus that structures interaction within each outlet. Differences among the outlets may therefore reflect not only variations in tone and style but also the kinds of content they publish and the audiences they attract. Editorial ethos and platform management, and not technology alone, affect interaction quality (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Helmond, 2015). Collectively, the four outlets form overlapping yet differentiated spaces that together constitute the Northeast's emergent digital public sphere.

Emergent patterns of peripheral publics

Across outlets, participation remains modest in scale but symbolically charged. The mixture of expressive and deliberative modes suggests that public interaction in peripheral regions operates through hybrid communicative forms. Following Keane (2018), these can be read as monitory micro-publics. Dispersed citizens exercising scrutiny and solidarity through mediated gestures.

Emotion here is not antithetical to democracy but a condition of it. Affective expression anchors belonging, while moments of reasoning introduce reflection. Together, they create what Papacharissi (2015) calls affective–deliberative participation, a communicative form where emotion and reasoning co-produce visibility.

Infrastructural constraints continue to shape participation. This is evident in the consistently low volume of comments across posts and the limited depth of interaction observed in most threads. Uneven connectivity, modest newsroom capacity, and algorithmic visibility filters limit sustained interaction (Baruah, 2020; Thomas, 2021). Within these constraints, even a handful of comments or shares represents civic effort under asymmetry. The publics that emerge are therefore infrastructure-shaped micro-publics (Mattoni, 2021). Fragmented but meaningful arenas where citizens of the Northeast enact presence in a national mediascape that often overlooks them.

Summary

The findings demonstrate that digital participation from India's Northeast is simultaneously limited and significant. Quantitative scarcity coexists with qualitative richness. Through the frameworks of Dahlgren, Keane, Papacharissi, and Couldry & Hepp, these Facebook interactions can be read as expressions of everyday democracy. They are micro-level acts through which citizens perform identity, critique, and belonging within constrained infrastructures. Even at low volumes, such engagements sustain the communicative texture of democratic life in a peripheral region, expanding the conceptual reach of the public sphere tradition to Asia's uneven digital landscapes.

Re-situating participation from the periphery

The study demonstrates that digital publics in India's Northeast engage in communicative practices that are modest in scale but rich in symbolic meaning. Rather than dismissing low engagement counts as absence, the findings urge a reconceptualisation of participation as interactional presence within constrained infrastructures. Following Dahlgren's (2009) interactional model, these small acts of liking, reacting, or brief commenting represent micro-gestures of belonging that keep democratic communication alive under unequal conditions. The region's publics, historically peripheral to both state and media attention, employ digital affordances not to replicate metropolitan deliberation but to assert visibility within asymmetrical structures of connection.

This reconceptualisation of participation from the periphery advances debates on digital citizenship in the Global South. Mainstream scholarship on participation often assumes robust infrastructures and high-volume engagement. Yet in peripheral regions, the density of participation cannot be the only measure of its significance. Instead, what matters is the directional intent. It shows how users signal alignment, critique, or affective solidarity despite technological and institutional limits. Such interactional traces constitute what Couldry and Hepp (2017) term ‘mediated presence’. The expressions of agency that rely on the infrastructures of mediation, even when these infrastructures restrict voice.

Affective–deliberative hybridity

A key insight emerging from the data is the coexistence of emotion and reasoning within the same communicative field. The dominance of expressive comments might, at first glance, appear to undermine deliberation. However, as Papacharissi (2015) argues, emotion is a constitutive element of networked publics, not their distortion. In the Northeast context, affect functions as a connective tissue linking dispersed citizens through shared experiences of marginalisation and pride. The emotive vocabulary of approval, irony, and anger thus anchors the public to issues that otherwise remain abstract.

Within this affective terrain, flashes of deliberation occur when users contest statistics, reference policy, or invoke regional history. These micro-moments confirm that deliberation survives not despite emotion but through it. The findings, therefore, extend the concept of affective publics toward an affective–deliberative model of participation. This hybrid form reflects a pragmatic public sensibility. People reason under conditions of emotional urgency and infrastructural limitation. Such hybridity expands normative expectations of the public sphere by showing that passion and critique, feeling and argument, coexist in digitally mediated civic life.

Micro-publics and everyday democracy

The selective, episodic nature of participation observed across outlets supports Keane's (2018) notion of monitory micro-publics. These are small, issue-based spheres where citizens practise oversight and commentary in real time. In the Northeast, comment threads on immigration posts functioned precisely as such micro-publics. They are temporally short but dense with affective meaning. They serve as dispersed mechanisms of ‘soft scrutiny’, where readers question representations, contest bias, or affirm belonging. Even when short-lived, these exchanges embody the ethos of everyday democracy. Here, citizens engage in public reasoning outside formal institutions.

By tracing these micro-publics, the study adds empirical depth to theories of monitory democracy in non-Western contexts. It shows that the democratic impulse endures not only through organised protest or policy debate but also through incremental, everyday acts of mediation. This finding is particularly relevant for regions where material constraints and historical marginality make large-scale deliberation difficult.

Framing and counter-public agency

The framing analysis illustrates how publics interpret contentious issues through culturally embedded moral vocabularies. The dominant threat frame surrounding immigration reflects long-standing anxieties over identity and resource distribution, but the emergence of humanitarian and coexistence perspectives demonstrates interpretive agency among citizens. These counter-frames are not merely oppositional. They signal the capacity of peripheral publics to negotiate meaning autonomously. As Fraser (1992) notes, counter-publics arise when subordinated groups generate alternative interpretations that challenge hegemonic discourse. In the Northeast, such counter-framing acts as a subtle form of negotiation. It reflects an attempt to balance self-protection with empathy within a mediated national conversation that often excludes regional nuance.

This duality – defensive and empathetic – is emblematic of publics formed under asymmetrical visibility. It suggests that peripheral citizens internalise national debates and adapt them to local histories and identities. Thus, framing becomes not merely an interpretive act but a practice of situated agency in which publics reclaim representational space through language and affect.

Infrastructural mediation and the limits of participation

The analysis also foregrounds the material dimension of digital citizenship. Participation in the Northeast is constrained by infrastructural scarcity, including limited bandwidth, small newsroom capacities, algorithmic opacity, and dependence on a single platform (Facebook). These conditions exemplify what Couldry and Hepp (2017) describe as the deep mediation of contemporary publics. The communication environments are structured as much by technological architectures as by public intent. In such contexts, publics are infrastructure-shaped rather than freely formed. As Mattoni (2021) notes, infrastructures configure visibility by determining whose voices travel and whose remain peripheral. Recognising this mediating layer reframes participation not as failure but as adaptation within uneven communicative ecosystems.

For policymakers and platform designers, this insight underscores the importance of infrastructural justice. It highlights the importance of ensuring equitable access, regional bandwidth parity, and algorithmic transparency. Without these, democratic participation will remain uneven across geography, language, and class.

Peripheral publics as conceptual contribution

By situating Northeast India's digital participation within broader debates on media and democracy, this study advances the concept of peripheral publics. These publics emerge at the intersection of structural marginality and mediated visibility. They differ from metropolitan publics not by absence of engagement but by its conditions: low volume, high affect, and infrastructural constraint. Peripheral publics thus expand the geography of the public sphere, illustrating that democratic communication in Asia is not only a metropolitan phenomenon but also a peripheral practice sustained through fragmentary, affective, and adaptive modes of engagement.

This concept contributes to comparative public sphere theory by challenging the centre-periphery hierarchy implicit in much Western literature. It also dialogues with emerging Global South scholarship that foregrounds infrastructural inequality as a constitutive element of mediated citizenship. Recognising peripheral publics as legitimate democratic actors enables more inclusive understandings of how democracy is lived and expressed in diverse communicative environments.

Conclusion

Digital participation in the Northeast of India embodies a paradox. It is limited in magnitude but meaningful in its democratic intent. Audience interaction on Facebook, found to be sporadic, emotive, and context-bound, reveals how citizens in marginal regions practise civic presence under constraint. Through hybrid affective–deliberative participation, they produce micro-publics that scrutinise, affirm, and negotiate identity within a mediated national conversation. Even when limited in scale, these interactions reflect an emergent form of civic voice that operates outside formal structures of representation.

This study, therefore, extends the public sphere theory along three axes. First, it re-defines participation as symbolic presence within infrastructural asymmetry, not simply numerical engagement. Second, it reconceptualises deliberation as an affective–deliberative continuum rather than a purely rational process. Third, it positions peripheral publics as vital components of contemporary democracy, reminding scholars that the margins of communication are not silent but differently voiced.

Future research could compare similar mediated peripheries across South and Southeast Asia to examine how infrastructural, cultural, and political specificities shape the contours of everyday digital citizenship. In tracing these small yet significant communicative acts, we understand democracy not as a fixed structure but as a dispersed, mediated practice continually negotiated through emotion, technology, and voice.