scholarly journals Partisan Selective Exposure in Times of Political and Technological Upheaval: A Social Media Field Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Mothes ◽  
Jakob Ohme
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Field Experiment ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political News ◽  
High Affinity ◽  
Social Monitoring ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Exposure Patterns ◽  
Run Up

Contemporary democracies are increasingly shaped by a surge of populism, posing serious threats to the idea of liberal democracy. Particularly in the run-up to elections, knowledge of such threats is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote. Against this background, the present study examined the likelihood of media users to engage with political news providing critical perspectives on populist movements in a 24-hour social media field experiment during the 2017 federal election campaign in Germany (<em>N</em> = 210). Based on two selective exposure measures, findings suggest that exposure to critical news is contingent upon the conceptualization of populist partisanship as a political orientation of either high commitment (i.e., voting intention) or high affinity (i.e., sympathy for a party). While high commitment triggered a rather classic confirmation bias, especially regarding click decisions, high affinity caused selection patterns to be more strongly guided by informational utility, particularly during newsfeed browsing, with counter-attitudinal information receiving more attention. When public sentiment cues were present, however, attitudinal patterns disappeared. These findings imply that partisan news use in times of political upheaval is best gauged by taking a closer look at the particular type of partisanship that guides selective exposure, as both types of partisanship caused contrary exposure patterns, and that today’s news environments potentially override attitudinal influences by providing additional social monitoring cues.

scholarly journals Incidental Exposure, Selective Exposure, and Political Information Sharing: Integrating Online Exposure Patterns and Expression on Social Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 363-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian E. Weeks ◽  
Daniel S. Lane ◽  
Dam Hee Kim ◽  
Slgi S. Lee ◽  
Nojin Kwak
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
Information Exposure ◽  
Incidental Exposure ◽  
Exposure Patterns ◽  
Political Party Affiliation

Political information sharing in social media offers citizens opportunities to engage with news and express their political views, but how do different patterns of online political information exposure, including both incidental and selective exposure, affect sharing? Using two-wave panel survey data collected in the United States, we examine the relationship between incidental and selective exposure and their consequent links to political information sharing, across different levels of strength of political party affiliation. Our results demonstrate that incidental exposure to counter-attitudinal information drives stronger partisans to more actively seek out like-minded political content, which subsequently encourages political information sharing on social media. The results highlight the need to consider both types of political information exposure when modeling citizens' political behavior online.

scholarly journals Understanding Coordinated and Inauthentic Link Sharing Behavior on Facebook in the Run-up to 2018 General Election and 2019 European Election in Italy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Giglietto ◽  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Giada Marino
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
General Election ◽  
Current Phase ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Election ◽  
Run Up

The year 2016 marked a turning point in the history of relations between the Internet, social media, public opinion, and politics. Online practices of grassroots participation, which used to be considered the prerogative of democratizing forces fighting established powers, turned out to be an effective platform for far-right extremists. In the attempt to make sense of what happened and develop workable solutions, stakeholders rapidly moved through the different stages of grief, ranging from denial to anger and acceptance.As a case in point, we trace the path through these stages which moved from an initial denial of the problem to concern over “fake news” and hoaxes, to finally focusing on the behavior of certain actors on the platform. Starting from the current phase, we analyze “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, a concept only briefly defined in Facebook public statements which, nevertheless, is useful to frame future studies insofar as both the idea of coordination and authenticity have been studied in the literature. Leveraging these works, we suggest a definition that is at once framed in this literature and easy to operationalize.Using this definition and an unprecedented combination of CrowdTangle API (a tool for accessing Facebook and other social media data) and two datasets of Italian political news stories published in the run-up to the 2018 Italian general election and 2019 European election, we developed a method that led to the identification of several networks of pages/groups/verified public profiles (“entities”) that shared the same political news stories on Facebook within a very short period of time (10 in 2018, composed of 28 entities, and 50 in 2019, composed of 143 entities). We call this behavior “coordinated link sharing”. By analyzing the social media profiles of such coordinated entities, we observed that while some of them were clearly political, others presented themselves as entertainment venues, despite sharing political content too. Since the political news stories shared by these non-political entities can reach a broad audience which is largely unguarded against attempts to influence, we describe their behavior as “inauthentic”.Further analyses showed that the news shared by the coordinated networks received a Facebook engagement higher than other news included in our dataset, that much news boosted anti-immigration and far-right propaganda and that several of the news outlets shared by these networks were already blacklisted by fact-checkers.

scholarly journals Credibility of Digital Political News in Spain: Comparison between Traditional Media and Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Reinald Besalú ◽  
Carles Pont-Sorribes
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Item ◽  
Digital Television ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Political News ◽  
Digital News ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Digital Formats

In the context of the dissemination of fake news and the traditional media outlets’ loss of centrality, the credibility of digital news emerges as a key factor for today’s democracies. The main goal of this paper was to identify the levels of credibility that Spanish citizens assign to political news in the online environment. A national survey (n = 1669) was designed to assess how the news format affected credibility and likelihood of sharing. Four different news formats were assessed, two of them linked to traditional media (digital newspapers and digital television) and two to social media (Facebook and WhatsApp). Four experimental groups assigned a credibility score and a likelihood of sharing score to four different political news items presented in the aforementioned digital formats. The comparison between the mean credibility scores assigned to the same news item presented in different formats showed significant differences among groups, as did the likelihood of sharing the news. News items shown in a traditional media format, especially digital television, were assigned more credibility than news presented in a social media format, and participants were also more likely to share the former, revealing a more cautious attitude towards social media as a source of news.

scholarly journals Echo chamber detection and analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Villa ◽  
Gabriella Pasi ◽  
Marco Viviani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Community Detection ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Detection Strategy ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Content Aware

AbstractSocial media allow to fulfill perceived social needs such as connecting with friends or other individuals with similar interests into virtual communities; they have also become essential as news sources, microblogging platforms, in particular, in a variety of contexts including that of health. However, due to the homophily property and selective exposure to information, social media have the tendency to create distinct groups of individuals whose ideas are highly polarized around certain topics. In these groups, a.k.a. echo chambers, people only "hear their own voice,” and divergent visions are no longer taken into account. This article focuses on the study of the echo chamber phenomenon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by considering both the relationships connecting individuals and semantic aspects related to the content they share over Twitter. To this aim, we propose an approach based on the application of a community detection strategy to distinct topology- and content-aware representations of the COVID-19 conversation graph. Then, we assess and analyze the controversy and homogeneity among the different polarized groups obtained. The evaluations of the approach are carried out on a dataset of tweets related to COVID-19 collected between January and March 2020.

scholarly journals Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Clarifying the Role of Political Ideology in the Reception of Political Communication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eike Mark Rinke ◽  
Julia Lück
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Communication Effects ◽  
Perceptions And Attitudes ◽  
Political Perceptions ◽  
The Individual

This essay examines the importance of political ideology for the occurrence of political communication effects on the individual level. It is a common assumption in this research area that people tend to be selective about the political information they expose themselves to and also to selectively process it. Selective exposure and selective perception processes are mainly based on the dominant political orientation of the recipient, which usually leads to a reinforcement of preexisting political perceptions and attitudes. We review recent research on selective exposure and perceptions and argue for greater involvement of findings in social psychology regarding differences in cognitive styles that underlie individual policy orientations and justify why and how these findings can promote the study of partisan selectivity in the reception of political communication. We conclude by highlighting theoretical and methodological perspectives arising from the proposed extension of research on selectivity in the process of receiving political communication. [Publication of this chapter in the public domain courtesy of Frank &amp; Timme publishers. Publisher website: http://www.frank-timme.de/verlag/verlagsprogramm/buch/verlagsprogramm/kathrin-mokmichael-stahl-hg-politische-kommunikation-heute/]

scholarly journals Collecting Pennsylvania Political Twitter Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Dudash ◽  
John E. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Academic Library ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Election Cycles

During the two most recent elections we have seen the importance of social media, and Twitter in particular, for political discourse. This paper describes the effort of an academic library to collect election-related Twitter data from Pennsylvania-specific organizational accounts and hashtags for 2018 and 2020 in the run-up and aftermath of both election cycles. Because of its importance to understanding contemporary politics and its historic value, libraries need to consider the opportunity to collect and make this data accessible to Pennsylvanians.  

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