Election-related talk and agenda-setting effects on Twitter

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon C. McGregor ◽  
Chris J. Vargo
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Analysis ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Perceived Importance ◽  
Media Types ◽  
Partisan Media ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
2012 Election ◽  
Do So

Abstract This study explores frequency of election-related chatter as an antecedent to agenda setting. In this study, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of 38 million tweets from the 2012 election. Users who participate more in election talk align more with partisan media than less active users. Users who participate less align less with partisan media and more with mainstream media. Overall, agenda-setting relationships differ by participation in election-related talk, with more active users exhibiting a greater agenda-setting effect across all media types. This study provides evidence that as Twitter users talk more about the election, they appear to do so in more homophilous information environments. These environments can alter their perceived importance of issues to match more partisan media. This study echoes previous research that has shown large conversations on Twitter to be more akin to partisan information.

Agenda Setting through Social Media: The Importance of Incidental News Exposure and Social Filtering in the Digital Era

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 482-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica T. Feezell
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Social Filtering ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Public Agenda ◽  
Perceived Importance

Conventional models of agenda setting hold that mainstream media influence the public agenda by leading audience attention, and perceived importance, to certain issues. However, increased selectivity and audience fragmentation in today’s digital media environment threaten the traditional agenda-setting power of the mass media. An important development to consider in light of this change is the growing use of social media for entertainment and information. This study investigates whether mainstream media can influence the public agenda when channeled through social media. By leveraging an original, longitudinal experiment, I test whether being exposed to political information through Facebook yields an agenda-setting effect by raising participants’ perceived importance of certain policy issues. Findings show that participants exposed to political information on Facebook exhibit increased levels of issue salience consistent with the issues shared compared with participants who were not shown political information; these effects are strongest among those with low political interest.

What the fake? Assessing the extent of networked political spamming and bots in the propagation of #fakenews on Twitter

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Al-Rawi ◽  
Jacob Groshek ◽  
Li Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Discourse ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
One Year

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine one of the largest data sets on the hashtag use of #fakenews that comprises over 14m tweets sent by more than 2.4m users.Design/methodology/approachTweets referencing the hashtag (#fakenews) were collected for a period of over one year from January 3 to May 7 of 2018. Bot detection tools were employed, and the most retweeted posts, most mentions and most hashtags as well as the top 50 most active users in terms of the frequency of their tweets were analyzed.FindingsThe majority of the top 50 Twitter users are more likely to be automated bots, while certain users’ posts like that are sent by President Donald Trump dominate the most retweeted posts that always associate mainstream media with fake news. The most used words and hashtags show that major news organizations are frequently referenced with a focus on CNN that is often mentioned in negative ways.Research limitations/implicationsThe research study is limited to the examination of Twitter data, while ethnographic methods like interviews or surveys are further needed to complement these findings. Though the data reported here do not prove direct effects, the implications of the research provide a vital framework for assessing and diagnosing the networked spammers and main actors that have been pivotal in shaping discourses around fake news on social media. These discourses, which are sometimes assisted by bots, can create a potential influence on audiences and their trust in mainstream media and understanding of what fake news is.Originality/valueThis paper offers results on one of the first empirical research studies on the propagation of fake news discourse on social media by shedding light on the most active Twitter users who discuss and mention the term “#fakenews” in connection to other news organizations, parties and related figures.

scholarly journals Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lewandowsky ◽  
Michael Jetter ◽  
Ullrich K. H. Ecker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Increased Activity

Abstract Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.

A Framework for the Interaction of Active Audiences and Influencers on Twitter: The Case of Zika Virus

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 2050032
Author(s):  
Shadi Shakeri
Keyword(s):  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Crisis Communication ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
User Involvement ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Network Community ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Over Time

In this paper, we investigate communication among Twitter users in the context of the 2016 Zika crisis, to understand how influencers and audiences contribute to agenda setting in health crisis communication. We analyse the content of 146,953 Zika-related tweets posted between April and September 2016 and examine how discussion topics vary by network community and user involvement over time. We argue that audiences adopt a broad view of health crisis-related issues and advocate for long-term solutions drawn from theories of active audiences and agenda-setting. Based on our observations on the Zika crisis case, we propose a framework for the dynamics in health crisis communication, which suggests a shift of discourse from a short-term perspective on specific issues to a long-term perspective on broader issues. The research contributes to the KM literature by suggesting a new method for converting individual tacit knowledge to collective explicit knowledge. Applying the framework to the coronavirus pandemic conversations can offer significant insights into the crisis.

Tracking the release of IPCC AR5 on Twitter: Users, comments, and sources following the release of the Working Group I Summary for Policymakers

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 815-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd P. Newman
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Immediate Release ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Group I ◽  
Science News ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twitter Users

Using the immediate release of the Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report as a case study, this article seeks to describe what type of actors were most active during the summary release, the substance of the most propagated tweets during the summary release, and the media sources that attracted the most attention during the summary release. The results from the study suggest that non-elite actors, such as individual bloggers and concerned citizens, accounted for the majority of the most propagated tweets in the sample. This study also finds that the majority of the most propagated tweets in the sample focused on public understanding of the report. Finally, while mainstream media sources were the most frequently discussed media sources, a number of new media and science news and information sources compete for audience attention.

scholarly journals Intermedia Agenda Setting in the Social Media Age: How Traditional Players Dominate the News Agenda in Election Times

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond A. Harder ◽  
Julie Sevenans ◽  
Peter Van Aelst
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Time Series Data ◽  
Fixed Time ◽  
Series Data ◽  
News Story ◽  
Time Lags ◽  
Intermedia Agenda Setting ◽  
Twitter Users

Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a “news story” approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a “traditional” analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. “Slow” newspapers, for example, often precede other media’s coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.

The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 2028-2049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris J Vargo ◽  
Lei Guo ◽  
Michelle A Amazeen
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
News Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Big Data Analysis ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Websites ◽  
Partisan Media ◽  
Selection Of

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.

scholarly journals The Charlie Hebdo Attacks on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of a Political Controversy in English and French

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511769364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos Smyrnaios ◽  
Pierre Ratinaud
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Original Method ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Large Scale Network ◽  
Scale Network ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Charlie Hebdo

In this article, we propose an original method combining large-scale network and lexicometric analysis to link identifiable communities of Twitter users with the main discursive themes they used in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, France in 2015. We used this method to compare tweets and user networks in French and in English. We observed that the majority of the users who tweeted about Charlie Hebdo were people without any particular affiliation, who were shocked by the attacks and immediately expressed themselves through emotionally charged messages. But rather quickly their proportion decreased and they participated less in politically polarizing discussions. On the other hand, we found that smaller, highly politicized, and polarized groups had similar attitudes toward the events: they were less engaged immediately after the attacks in emotional expression of sympathy and shock, but they participated vividly in the following days in polemical discussions or engaged themes. Other findings include the central position of mainstream media and the existence of groups of users that aggregated on the basis of nationality. More generally, our results show clearly that even the most dramatic events such as a terrorist attack with innocent victims do not produce homogeneous reactions online. Rather, political engagement and cultural dispositions are keys to understand different attitudes on Twitter.

scholarly journals Policy agenda-setting studies: an overview of Brazilian research

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (6) ◽  
pp. 1498-1512
Author(s):  
Ana Cláudia Niedhardt Capella
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
International Literature ◽  
Multiple Streams ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Production ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Multiple Streams Model ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article aims to present a brief reflection on the studies in the field of the public policy agenda. To this end, the text presents the main theoretical and methodological developments on the subject found in the international literature, with an emphasis on three fundamental contributions: the studies developed by Cobb and Elder in the 1970s; John Kingdon’s multiple streams model in the 1980s; and Baumgartner and Jones’ propositions from the 1990s until the present. Next, we seek to understand how policy agenda-setting studies have been developed in Brazil. To do so, we conduct a mapping of the Brazilian academic production, considering theses, dissertations, and articles published in journals between 2000 and 2018. In conclusion, we note the growing expansion of agenda studies in Brazil, and we draw attention to some of the characteristics of these works, such as the preferred policy areas and the theoretical and methodological frameworks favored by researchers, among other aspects.

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