  Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic
discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find
opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves.
This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological
homophily marked by "filter bubble" or "echo chambers." A typical response to
the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more
cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across
partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of
discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in
which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers,
users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political
opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep
roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is
comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored
properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of
conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral
bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of
uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of
the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically
neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite
relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically
neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in
Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the
national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a
universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.
