When Social Media Become Hostile Media: An Experimental Examination of News Sharing, Partisanship, and Follower Count

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-234
Author(s):  
Tae Kyoung Lee ◽  
Youngju Kim ◽  
Kevin Coe
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Edson C. Tandoc ◽  
Alice Huang ◽  
Andrew Duffy ◽  
Rich Ling ◽  
Nuri Kim

Guided by the framework of reciprocity on social media, the current study investigated antecedents of news sharing. Using a two-wave panel survey involving 868 respondents who took two surveys about one year apart, this study examined the effect of frequency of receiving news on social media on subsequent news-sharing behaviour, while controlling for demographics, news-sharing motivations and trust in social media news. The study found that motivation for self-presentation and trust in news shared by one's social media network positively predicted news sharing on social media. Frequency of receiving news at Time 1 also predicted sharing news subsequently at Time 2. This points to news being valued as a form of social currency.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagit Bar-Gill ◽  
Yael Inbar ◽  
Shachar Reichman

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 205015792095844
Author(s):  
Antonis Kalogeropoulos

Recently, in many countries, the use of mobile messaging applications for news has risen while the use of Facebook for news has declined. The purpose of this study is to identify who shares news on messaging applications, why and in what ways. Findings from a survey and focus groups in the US, the UK, Germany, and Brazil show that (a) the main motivation for news users to share news in these spaces is context collapse; their aversion to news sharing on an open network like Facebook, (b) the anytime/anywhere mobile affordance facilitates their need for private news sharing, (c) news stories chosen for sharing usually revolve around niche interests or breaking news events and not politics and current affairs, (d) news sharers are likely to be young, and to trust in news found on social media in the Western countries of our sample, while they tend to be older and partisan in Brazil where 38% of the population shares news on mobile messaging apps during an average week.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 4255-4274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chadwick ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Ben O’Loughlin

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing ( N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data ( N = 17,989 web domains), news article data ( N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users ( N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.


Corpora ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Bednarek

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.


Author(s):  
Alberto Ardèvol-Abreu ◽  
Patricia Delponti ◽  
Carmen Rodríguez-Wangüemert

The main social media platforms have been implementing strategies to minimize fake news dissemination. These include identifying, labeling, and penalizing –via news feed ranking algorithms– fake publications. Part of the rationale behind this approach is that the negative effects of fake content arise only when social media users are deceived. Once debunked, fake posts and news stories should therefore become harmless. Unfortunately, the literature shows that the effects of misinformation are more complex and tend to persist and even backfire after correction. Furthermore, we still do not know much about how social media users evaluate content that has been fact-checked and flagged as false. More worryingly, previous findings suggest that some people may intentionally share made up news on social media, although their motivations are not fully explained. To better understand users’ interaction with social media content identified or recognized as false, we analyze qualitative and quantitative data from five focus groups and a sub-national online survey (N = 350). Findings suggest that the label of ‘false news’ plays a role –although not necessarily central– in social media users’ evaluation of the content and their decision (not) to share it. Some participants showed distrust in fact-checkers and lack of knowledge about the fact-checking process. We also found that fake news sharing is a two-dimensional phenomenon that includes intentional and unintentional behaviors. We discuss some of the reasons why some of social media users may choose to distribute fake news content intentionally.


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