I have argued in this thesis that, because Twitter and Facebook do not have the same possibilities, people can express their minority views on these platforms from different manners. The possibilities I considered were friend networks on each platform, visibility and identifiability. I have argued that on Twitter, people may feel freer to express minority views because Twitter networks tend to be composed of strangers or weak acquaintances; therefore, people would not fear losing these relationships if they expressed a dissenting opinion to the same extent as on Facebook, where people interact with real friends or stronger ties, such as family members. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Similarly, I have argued that Facebook posts are more visible because the platform automatically notifies people's friend networks of a post, while Twitter's notification system is less visible. prominent. As a result, people would be more afraid to express a different point of view on Facebook, where real friends could see it, than on Twitter, among strangers and weak acquaintances. Finally, I argued that Facebook requires more visibility into people's identities by requiring a real name and encouraging the inclusion of multiple details about a person in their profile, while Twitter allows fake names and does not let space for many details about a person. This less identification on Twitter, I argued, would make people freer to express minority views, because they would not be afraid of offending real friends because they can distance their Twitter profile from their true personality. My findings support this assertion. I found that people were more willing to express controversial opinions that they believed to be in the minority on Twitter than on Facebook. I also found that users also tend to use opinion expression avoidance strategies more often on Facebook than on Twitter when the majority of their network disagrees with them. This offers important new insights into how affordances operate across various social media platforms. These results suggest that even if people do not consciously think about differences in means, these means influence how they express their opinions on these platforms. Norman (1990) argued that “means provide strong clues about how things work” (p. 9). ). Similarly, Gibson (1982) stated that financial means can constrain or encourage certain actions. My findings strongly support this assertion. My results showed that when the same people were asked if they would express a controversial minority point of view on Twitter and on Facebook, they reported being more constrained on Facebook. This suggests that it is the capabilities of these two platforms that may lead to differences, not the fact that different people may be drawn to use Twitter rather than Facebook. Thus, this suggests that differences in people's opinion discussion behaviors are not just a function of the platform they choose to use. Rather, this study provided preliminary evidence that it is the affordances of each platform that may lead people to change their behaviors when interacting on one against the other. This begins to answer a question left unanswered by researchprevious studies, which also found that people differed in the way they communicate on Twitter and Facebook. However, this study did not clarify whether different people are attracted to Twitter and Facebook and that is why opinion discussion behaviors may differ or because the same people would express their opinions differently. Furthermore, my results demonstrated that it is possible that people are more concerned about agreeing on a controversial issue with certain people rather than the rest of their network on social media sites. For example, the majority of people's networks may agree with them on a controversial topic, but if their key strong ties disagree with them, they may not want to express their opinion on that network due to their high visibility and identification and they may not want to upset their key connections. In other words, the possibilities offered by the network of friends, visibility and identifiability together contribute to creating a climate on Twitter where people can be freer to express controversial minority opinions because they feel less visible and identifiable, and that they are less afraid of offending their weakest. build relationships or strangers, so they feel emboldened. Given the image above, one of the main theoretical contributions of this work is to suggest that a favorable opinion climate alone is not sufficient to explain people's willingness to express their opinions on a controversial question on social media platforms. Depending on the possibilities offered by each platform, people may not want to express their opinions if they feel more identifiable, more visible or if they mainly interact with friends and relatives with close ties. The concept of homophily is helpful in understanding my findings. Some studies suggest that people tend to talk about controversial issues with their homogeneous networks or close ties (Marsden, 1987) and that users are likely to have a homogeneous network on Facebook (Lönnqvist & Itkonen, 2015). On the other hand, the results of this thesis suggest that people tend to avoid discussing controversial issues on homophilous Facebook, and that they are more likely to discuss these issues on the more heterogeneous Twitter. Another explanation for these results could be that high visibility and identification could increase people's awareness of the diversity of opinion within user networks on Facebook. Thus, although users are more likely to have homophilic networks on Facebook, increased awareness of diverse opinions could reduce their perceived homophily and increase ambivalence toward a controversial discussion on Facebook. Thus, this increased awareness may explain why users self-censor and prefer not to talk about controversial topics on Facebook. This study also supports the idea that visibility and identifiability can influence users' opinion expression behaviors on social media sites. The result showed that people tend to express their opinions on Twitter where visibility and identifiability are low, unlike on Facebook where these two means of access are high. Gaver (1996) hypothesized that means of access can influence social interaction between people. The results suggest that although Twitter users tend to express their opinions on a controversial issue, they tend to use avoidance strategies on Facebook and avoid interacting with their network on an issue.