scholarly journals News Sharing on Social Media: Mapping the Ideology of News Media Content, Citizens, and Politicians

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Eady ◽  
Richard Bonneau ◽  
Joshua A Tucker ◽  
Jonathan Nagler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Online News ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Sharing Space ◽  
News Sharing

This article examines the news sharing behavior of politicians and ordinary users by mapping the ideological sharing space of political information on social media. As data, we use the near-universal currency of online political information exchange: URLs (i.e. web links). We introduce a methodological approach (and statistical software) that unifies the measurement of political ideology online, using social media sharing data to jointly estimate the ideology of: (1) politicians; (2) social media users, and (3) the news sources that they share online. Second, we validate the measure by comparing it to well-known measures of roll call voting behavior for members of congress. Third, we show empirically that legislators who represent less competitive districts are more likely to share politically polarizing news than legislators with similar voting records in more competitive districts. Finally, we demonstrate that it is nevertheless not politicians, but ordinary users who share the most ideologically extreme content and contribute most to the polarized online news-sharing ecosystem. Our approach opens up many avenues for research into the communication strategies of elites, citizens, and other actors who seek to influence political behavior and sway public opinion by sharing political information online.

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.

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.

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.

Young adults know that their issues are not represented in the news: Israeli young adults and mainstream news media

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny Nuriely ◽  
Moti Gigi ◽  
Yuval Gozansky
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the ways socio-economic issues are represented in mainstream news media and how it is consumed, understood and interpreted by Israeli young adults (YAs). It examines how mainstream media uses neo-liberal discourse, and the ways YAs internalize this ethic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome its limitations. Design/methodology/approach This was a mixed methods study. First, it undertook content analysis of the most popular Israeli mainstream news media among YAs: the online news site Ynet and the TV Channel 2 news. Second, the authors undertook semi-structured in-depth interviews with 29 Israeli YAs. The analysis is based on an online survey of 600 young Israelis, aged 18–35 years. Findings Most YAs did not perceive mainstream media as enabling a reliable understanding of the issues important to them. The content analysis revealed that self-representation of YAs is rare, and that their issues were explained, and even resolved, by older adults. Furthermore, most of YAs' problems in mainstream news media were presented using a neo-liberal perspective. Finally, from the interviews, the authors learned that YAs did not find information that could help them deal with their most pressing economic and social issue, in the content offered by mainstream media. For most of them, social media overcomes these shortcomings. Originality/value Contrary to research that has explored YAs’ consumerism of new media outlets, this article explores how YAs in Israel are constructed in the media, as well as the way in which YAs understand mainstream and new social media coverage of the issues most important to them. Using media content analysis and interviews, the authors found that Young Adults tend to be ambivalent toward media coverage. They understand the lack of media information: most of them know that they do not learn enough from the media. This acknowledgment accompanies their tendency to internalize the neo-liberal logic and conservative Israeli national culture, in which class and economic redistribution are largely overlooked. Mainstream news media uses neo-liberal discourse, and young adults internalize this logic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome the limitations this discourse offers. They do so by turning to social media, mainly Facebook. Consequently, their behavior maintains the logic of the market, while also developing new social relations, enabled by social media.

The Impact of Social vs. Nonsocial Referring Channels on Online News Consumption

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagit Bar-Gill ◽  
Yael Inbar ◽  
Shachar Reichman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Online News ◽  
Clickstream Data ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Online Newspaper ◽  
News Website ◽  
The Impact ◽  
News Sharing ◽  
Sharing Behavior

The digitization of news markets has created a key role for online referring channels. This research combines field and laboratory experiments and analysis of large-scale clickstream data to study the effects of social versus nonsocial referral sources on news consumption in a referred news website visit. We theorize that referrer-specific browsing modes and referrer-induced news consumption thresholds interact to impact news consumption in referred visits to an online newspaper and that news sharing motivations invoked by the referral source impact sharing behavior in these referred visits. We find that social media referrals promote directed news consumption—visits with fewer articles, shorter durations, yet higher reading completion rates—compared with nonsocial referrals. Furthermore, social referrals invoke weaker informational sharing motivations relative to nonsocial referrals, thus leading to a lower news sharing propensity relative to nonsocial referrals. The results highlight how news consumption changes when an increasing amount of traffic is referred by social media, provide insights applicable to news outlets’ strategies, and speak to ongoing debates regarding biases arising from social media’s growing importance as an avenue for news consumption. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.

scholarly journals Who to Trust on Social Media: How Opinion Leaders and Seekers Avoid Disinformation and Echo Chambers

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512091399
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Sara Minaeian ◽  
Ariane Paquet-Labelle ◽  
Simon Beaudry
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Opinion Leaders ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Information Verification ◽  
Low Levels

As trust in news media and social media dwindles and fears of disinformation and echo chambers spread, individuals need to find ways to access and assess reliable and trustworthy information. Despite low levels of trust in social media, they are used for accessing political information and news. In this study, we examine the information verification practices of opinion leaders (who consume political information above average and share their opinions on social media above average) and of opinion seekers (who seek out political information from friends and family) to understand similarities and differences in their news media trust, fact-checking behaviors, and likeliness of being caught in echo chambers. Based on a survey of French Internet users ( N = 2,000) we find that not only opinion leaders, but also opinion seekers, have higher rates across all three of these dependent variables. We discuss the implications of findings for the development of opinion leadership theory as well as for social media platforms wishing to increase trust.

scholarly journals Analysis on Fake News Detection Methodologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1572-1575
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Online News ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Real ◽  
Online Social Media

Fake news is a coinage often used to refer to fabricated news that uses eye-catching headlines for increased sales rather than legitimate well-researched news, spread via online social media. Emergence of fake news has been increased with the immense use of online news media and social media. Low cost, easy access and rapid dissemination of information lead people to consume news from social media. Since the spread rate of these contents are faster it becomes difficult to identify the fake news from the accurate information. People can download articles from sites, share the content, re-share from others and by the end of the day the false information has gone far from its original site that it becomes very difficult to compare with the real news. It is a long standing problem that affects the digital social media due to its serious threats of misleading information, it creates an immense impact on the society. Hence the identification of such news are relevant and so certain measures needs to be taken in order to reduce or distinguish between the real and fake news. This paper provides a survey on recent past research papers done on this domain and provides an idea on different techniques on machine learning and deep learning that could help in the identification of fake and real news.

scholarly journals Between Bullshit and Faketuality

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Pilipets
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Online News ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Visual Content ◽  
Viral Spread ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Media Environments

This paper explores the anomalous role that today’s social media environments play in the dynamics of affective amplification through viral visual content. Affected by the post 9/11 logic of media securitization, the circulation of manipulated images and internet memes has created an atmosphere of controversial sentiments and irrational facts. The prevalent experience of disorientation that perpetuates itself in these relations feeds on the everyday micro-anticipations of claim and counterclaim, making the double binary of fact and fiction, source and adaptation impossible to sustain. Against this background, the discussion will focus on how the viral spread of one particular image during the refugee crisis has contributed to the emergence of the issue of ‘terrorist refugees’. Exploring the infrastructures of media alert behind this issue, I address the re- and premediating forces at play in the circulation of the image as faketual. Rather than relying on the availability of valid sources, networked formations of faketuality feel true even they are known to be fabricated. I develop this argument by adapting digital methods to reflect on the shifts in controversial relations of relevance/visibility as they unfold through our everyday encounters with search engines, online news media, and social platforms.

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