Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 3161-3182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yini Zhang ◽  
Chris Wells ◽  
Song Wang ◽  
Karl Rohe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Spectral Clustering ◽  
Citizen Action ◽  
Media System ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
News Value ◽  
Network Similarity ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Mainstream Press

Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream press. Using spectral clustering based on social network similarity, we identify key publics that constituted Trump’s Twitter following and demonstrate how particular publics amplified his social media presence in different ways. Our discussion raises questions about how algorithms “read” metrics to guide content on social media platforms, how journalists draw on social media metrics in their determinations of news value and worthiness, and how the process of amplification relates to possibilities of citizen action through digital communication.

scholarly journals Electoral Disinformation: Looking Through the Lens of Tsek.ph Fact Checks

Plaridel ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-295
Author(s):  
Yvonne Chua ◽  
Jake Soriano
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Fact Checking

Elections are fertile ground for disinformation. The 2019 midterm elections, like the 2016 presidential election, buttress this observation. This ugly side of electoral contests is documented by Tsek.ph, a pioneering collaborative fact-checking initiative launched by three universities and eleven newsrooms specifically for the midterms. Its repository of fact checks provides valuable insights into the nature of electoral disinformation before, during and after the elections. Clearly, electoral disinformation emanates from candidates and supporters alike, on conventional (e.g., speeches and sorties) and digital (e.g., social media) platforms. Its wide range of victims includes the media no less.

scholarly journals Investigating evaluation and news values in news items that are shared through social media

Corpora ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Bednarek
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Online News ◽  
News Values ◽  
News Value ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Linguistic Focus ◽  
News Corpus ◽  
News Sharing

The sharing of news through social media platforms is now a significant part of mainstream online media use and is an increasingly important consideration in journalism practice and production. This paper analyses the linguistic characteristics of online news sharing on Facebook, with a focus on evaluation and news values in a corpus of the 100 ‘most shared’ news items from ‘heritage’ English-language news media organisations. Analyses combine corpus linguistic techniques (semantic tagging, frequency analysis, concordancing) with manual, computer-aided annotation. The main focus is on discursive news values analysis (DNVA), which examines how news values are established through semiotic resources, enabling new empirical insights into shared news and adding a specific linguistic focus to the emerging literature on news sharing. Results suggest that all ‘traditional’ news values appear to be construed in the shared news corpus and that there is variety in terms of the items that are widely shared. At the same time, the news values of Eliteness, Superlativeness, Unexpectedness, Negativity and Timeliness seem especially important in the corpus. The findings also indicate that ‘unexpected’ and ‘affective’ news items may be shared more, and that Negativity is a more important news value than Positivity.

scholarly journals Logics of the Icelandic Hybrid Media System

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Birgir Guðmundsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Media System ◽  
Network Media ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Logic

AbstractThe increased importance of social media platforms and network media logic merging with traditional media logic are a trademark of modern hybrid systems of political communication. This article looks at this development through the media-use by politicians before the 2016 and 2017 parliamentary elections in Iceland. Aggregate results from candidate surveys on the use and perceived importance of different media forms are used to examine the role of the new platform Snapchat in relation to other media, and to highlight the dynamics of the hybrid media system in Iceland. The results show that Snapchat is exploited more by younger politicians and those already using social media platforms. However, in spite of this duality between old and new media, users of traditional platforms still use new media and vice versa. This points to the existance of a delicate operational balance between different media logics, that could change as younger politicians move more centre stage.

scholarly journals Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Myers West
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Information Flows ◽  
Individual User ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Moderation Process

Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers—by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users’ labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook’s nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms.

Social Media and Democracy in Crisis

2019 ◽  
pp. 212-227
Author(s):  
Bradshaw Samantha ◽  
Howard Philip N.
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
The Uk

The Internet and social media were originally viewed as democratizing technologies that would lead to a more vibrant digital public sphere. Following the outcomes of the 2016 US Presidential Election and the UK Brexit referendum, however, social media platforms have faced increasing criticism for allowing fake news, disinformation campaigns, and hate speech to spread. But how much bad information was spread? What can be done to address the problem? This chapter examines how social media algorithms and computational propaganda are reshaping public life. The authors explore how modern citizens are especially susceptible to computational propaganda, due not only to the prevalence of disinformation, but also to a political psychology that is often called “elective affinity” or “selective exposure.” The authors use their findings to discuss the responsibilities of both users and platforms for protecting the digital public sphere.

scholarly journals The Consequences of Digitally Driven Changes in Political Campaigning for Democratic Societies: A Case Study of the 2020 US Presidential Election

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Aryati Arbay ◽  
Julian Aldrin Pasha ◽  
Ari Santoso Widodo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Democratic Societies

The effect from COVID-19 pandemic has changed how presidential candidates do their political campaigns. The restriction to do social distancing makes the usual campaign not doable. That’s why presidential candidates need to find another way for their political campaign, which is by doing things digitally. This digitally driven changes can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we discuss about the consequences of the changes in political campaigns in digital form or through social media for democratic societies in US presidential election. We use qualitative descriptive with case study method. In this paper we use secondary data such as research journals that’s related to this topic, documentation and articles. We find that the changes to digital campaigning have its own pros and cons that can affect how politicians do their campaigns on their social media platforms.

Illusions of Empowerment

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Weisgerber
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital Democracy ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Systems

This article calls into question the social media empowerment narrative and the underlying idea that social media platforms are empowering everyday netizens to have their voices heard. The author argues that social media technologies may simply privilege only those Internet users who are new media savvy and have leisure time to participate in the so-called digital democracy. While social media systems might have lowered the entrance threshold for civic engagement, hurdles such as the growing competition in an attention economy, the odds of standing out amidst millions of other individual voices, knowledge of new media technologies required to achieve visibility, and time demands make the social media empowerment vision more difficult to attain than the architects of the empowerment ideology have made the public to believe.

Assembling the Networks and Audiences of Disinformation: How Successful Russian IRA Twitter Accounts Built Their Followings, 2015–2017

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yini Zhang ◽  
Josephine Lukito ◽  
Min-Hsin Su ◽  
Jiyoun Suk ◽  
Yiping Xia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Communication System ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Network Dynamics ◽  
Internet Research ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Attention Economy

Abstract This study investigates how successful Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts constructed the followings that were central to their disinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Treating an account’s social media following as both an ego network and an audience critical for information diffusion and influence accrual, we situate IRA Twitter accounts’ accumulation of followers in the ideologically polarized, attention driven, and asymmetric political communication system. Results show that partisan enclaves on Twitter contributed to IRA accounts’ followings through retweeting; and that mainstream and hyperpartisan media assisted conservative IRA accounts’ following gain by embedding their tweets in news. These results illustrate how network dynamics within social media and news media amplification beyond it together boosted social media followings. Our results also highlight the dynamics fanning the flames of disinformation: partisan polarization, media fragmentation and asymmetry, and an attention economy optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.

Citizen Engagement and Social Media

2022 ◽  
pp. 945-966
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan ◽  
Juan Carlos Montes de Oca Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
High Level ◽  
Media Data

Social media has transformed election campaigns around the world. While it is difficult to determine to what extent social media influence voters' decisions, there is no doubt that social media platforms impact on candidate advertising and public debate during elections. This research, the methodological formulation of which is based on a case study, seeks to investigate the use of social media during political campaigns to collect signatures of support. In the elections of 2018, aspiring candidates for presidential election required a certain number of signatures of support in order to register as official candidates. We collected social media data on a weekly basis from the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of seven candidates and contrasted this data with the number of signatures validated by the electoral authority. We found no relationship between the level of support received and the use of social media in the case of any of the candidates. However, we observed candidates who did achieve the required number of signatures and who did receive official presidential candidate status as a result of their high level of visibility. This research contributes methodologically to the current literature and provides empirical evidence regarding independent candidates in Mexico.

scholarly journals The Consequences of Digitally Driven Changes in Political Campaigning for Democratic Societies: A Case Study of the 2020 US Presidential Election

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Aryati Arbay ◽  
◽  
Julian Aldrin Pasha ◽  
Ari Santoso Widodo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Democratic Societies

The effect from COVID-19 pandemic has changed how presidential candidates do their political campaigns. The restriction to do social distancing makes the usual campaign not doable. That’s why presidential candidates need to find another way for their political campaign, which is by doing things digitally. This digitally driven changes can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we discuss about the consequences of the changes in political campaigns in digital form or through social media for democratic societies in US presidential election. We use qualitative descriptive with case study method. In this paper we use secondary data such as research journals that’s related to this topic, documentation and articles. We find that the changes to digital campaigning have its own pros and cons that can affect how politicians do their campaigns on their social media platforms.

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