Emotional Stimuli in Social Media User Behavior: Emoji Reactions on a News Media Facebook Page

2018 ◽  
pp. 242-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna S. Smoliarova ◽  
Tamara M. Gromova ◽  
Natalia A. Pavlushkina
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Emotional Stimuli

Attentional capture helps explain why moral and emotional content go viral

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Brady ◽  
Ana P. Gantman ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Lab Experiments ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Shed Light

Our social media newsfeeds are filled with a variety of content all battling for our limited attention. Across three studies, we investigated whether moral and emotional content captures our attention more than other content and if this may help explain why this content is more likely to go viral online. Using a combination of controlled lab experiments and nearly 50,000 political tweets, we found that moral and emotional content are prioritized in early visual attention more than neutral content, and that such attentional capture is associated with increased retweets during political conversations online. Furthermore, we found that the differences in attentional capture among moral and emotional stimuli could not be fully explained by differences in arousal. These studies suggest that attentional capture is one basic psychological process that helps explain the increased diffusion of moral and emotional content during political discourse on social media, and shed light on ways in which political leaders, disinformation profiteers, marketers, and activist organizations can spread moralized content by capitalizing on natural tendencies of our perceptual systems.

Predictability of User Behavior in Social Media: Bottom-Up v Top-Down Modeling

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Darmon ◽  
Jared Sylvester ◽  
Michelle Girvan ◽  
William M. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up

scholarly journals Introduction to special issue about election reporting: Why journalism (still) matters

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 985-993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Cushion ◽  
Daniel Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Campaign Coverage ◽  
Election Coverage ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This introduction unpacks the eight articles that make up this Journalism special issue about election reporting. Taken together, the articles ask: How has election reporting evolved over the last century across different media? Has the relationship between journalists and candidates changed in the digital age of campaigning? How do contemporary news values influence campaign coverage? Which voices – politicians, say or journalists – are most prominent? How far do citizens inform election coverage? How is public opinion articulated in the age of social media? Are sites such as Twitter developing new and distinctive election agendas? In what ways does social media interact with legacy media? How well have scholars researched and theorised election reporting cross-nationally? How can research agendas be enhanced? Overall, we argue this Special Issue demonstrates the continued strength of news media during election campaigns. This is in spite of social media platforms increasingly disrupting and recasting the agenda setting power of legacy media, not least by political parties and candidates who are relying more heavily on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to campaign. But while debates in recent years have centred on the technological advances in political communication and the associated role of social media platforms during election campaigns (e.g. microtargeting voters, spreading disinformation/misinformation and allowing candidates to bypass media to campaign), our collection of studies signal the enduring influence professional journalists play in selecting and framing of news. Put more simply, how elections are reported still profoundly matters in spite of political parties’ and candidates’ more sophisticated use of digital campaigning.

Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence From the 2015 UK Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Kevin Munger ◽  
Patrick J. Egan ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Jonathan Ronen ◽  
Joshua Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Media Platform

Abstract Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

scholarly journals Source Trust and COVID-19 Information Sharing: The Mediating Roles of Emotions and Beliefs About Sharing

2020 ◽  
pp. 109019812098476
Author(s):  
Linqi Lu ◽  
Jiawei Liu ◽  
Y. Connie Yuan ◽  
Kelli S. Burns ◽  
Enze Lu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Health Information ◽  
News Media ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Source Trust ◽  
Health Information Sharing

Health information sharing has become especially important during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic because people need to learn about the disease and then act accordingly. This study examines the perceived trust of different COVID-19 information sources (health professionals, academic institutions, government agencies, news media, social media, family, and friends) and sharing of COVID-19 information in China. Specifically, it investigates how beliefs about sharing and emotions mediate the effects of perceived source trust on source-specific information sharing intentions. Results suggest that health professionals, academic institutions, and government agencies are trusted sources of information and that people share information from these sources because they think doing so will increase disease awareness and promote disease prevention. People may also choose to share COVID-19 information from news media, social media, and family as they cope with anxiety, anger, and fear. Taken together, a better understanding of the distinct psychological mechanisms underlying health information sharing from different sources can help contribute to more effective sharing of information about COVID-19 prevention and to manage negative emotion contagion during the pandemic.

scholarly journals A Multi-platform Approach to Monitoring Negative Dominance for COVID-19 Vaccine-Related Information Online

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Paola Pascual-Ferrá ◽  
Neil Alperstein ◽  
Daniel J. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Adverse Events ◽  
News Media ◽  
Search Behavior ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Negative Dominance ◽  
Media Data

Abstract Objective The aim of this study was to test the appearance of negative dominance in COVID-19 vaccine-related information and activity online. We hypothesized that if negative dominance appeared, it would be a reflection of peaks in adverse events related to the vaccine, that negative content would attract more engagement on social media than other vaccine-related posts, and posts referencing adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination would have a higher average toxicity score. Methods We collected data using Google Trends for search behavior, CrowdTangle for social media data, and Media Cloud for media stories, and compared them against the dates of key adverse events related to COVID-19. We used Communalytic to analyze the toxicity of social media posts by platform and topic. Results While our first hypothesis was partially supported, with peaks in search behavior for image and YouTube videos driven by adverse events, we did not find negative dominance in other types of searches or patterns of attention by news media or on social media. Conclusion We did not find evidence in our data to prove the negative dominance of adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination on social media. Future studies should corroborate these findings and, if consistent, focus on explaining why this may be the case.

New Indian online rules risk state overreach and abuse

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Online News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Digital Service ◽  
The Government

Significance The new rules follow a stand-off between Twitter and the central government last month over some posts and accounts. The government has used this stand-off as an opportunity not only to tighten rules governing social media, including Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn, but also those for other digital service providers including news publishers and entertainment streaming companies. Impacts Government moves against dominant social media platforms will boost the appeal of smaller platforms with light or no content moderation. Hate speech and harmful disinformation are especially hard to control and curb on smaller platforms. The new rules will have a chilling effect on online public discourse, increasing self-censorship (at the very least). Government action against online news media would undercut fundamental democratic freedoms and the right to dissent. Since US-based companies dominate key segments of the Indian digital market, India’s restrictive rules could mar India-US ties.

An Experimental Study of Spammer Detection on Chinese Microblogs

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (11n12) ◽  
pp. 1759-1777
Author(s):  
Jialing Liang ◽  
Peiquan Jin ◽  
Lin Mu ◽  
Jie Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Real Data ◽  
User Profile ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
The Government ◽  
Hot Event

With the development of Web 2.0, social media such as Twitter and Sina Weibo have become an essential platform for disseminating hot events. Simultaneously, due to the free policy of microblogging services, users can post user-generated content freely on microblogging platforms. Accordingly, more and more hot events on microblogging platforms have been labeled as spammers. Spammers will not only hurt the healthy development of social media but also introduce many economic and social problems. Therefore, the government and enterprises must distinguish whether a hot event on microblogging platforms is a spammer or is a naturally-developing event. In this paper, we focus on the hot event list on Sina Weibo and collect the relevant microblogs of each hot event to study the detecting methods of spammers. Notably, we develop an integral feature set consisting of user profile, user behavior, and user relationships to reflect various factors affecting the detection of spammers. Then, we employ typical machine learning methods to conduct extensive experiments on detecting spammers. We use a real data set crawled from the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform, Sina Weibo, and evaluate the performance of 10 machine learning models with five sampling methods. The results in terms of various metrics show that the Random Forest model and the over-sampling method achieve the best accuracy in detecting spammers and non-spammers.

scholarly journals Advancing children’s news media literacy: learning from the practices and experiences of young Australians

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 689-707
Author(s):  
Tanya Notley ◽  
Michael Dezuanni
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Literacy Learning ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Nationally Representative

Social media use has redefined the production, experience and consumption of news media. These changes have made verifying and trusting news content more complicated and this has led to a number of recent flashpoints for claims and counter-claims of ‘fake news’ at critical moments during elections, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Concerns regarding the actual and potential social impact of fake news led us to carry out the first nationally representative survey of young Australians’ news practices and experiences. Our analysis finds that while social media is one of young people’s preferred sources of news, they are not confident about spotting fake news online and many rarely or never check the source of news stories. Our findings raise important questions regarding the need for news media literacy education – both in schools and in the home. Therefore, we consider the historical development of news media literacy education and critique the relevance of dominant frameworks and pedagogies currently in use. We find that news media has become neglected in media literacy education in Australia over the past three decades, and we propose that current media literacy frameworks and pedagogies in use need to be rethought for the digital age.

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