scholarly journals Characterizing Reactions and Comments Associated with News on Facebook

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Guimarães ◽  
Fabrício Benevenuto
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
New Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Detailed Characterization ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Facebook Pages

News consumption is increasingly done on social media websites. In this environment, all types of entities and people present themselves as news sources. These new outlets might focus on specific audiences, and some exhibit the news less objectively. Facebook is one of these platforms, which categorizes an extensive group of pages as a kind of news media. To analyze this phenomenon, it is crucial to characterize all pages that disseminate information in this ecosystem. Our main objective is to create an in-depth diagnostic of news stories and opinions, focusing on Brazilian Facebook. Our contributions are: (i) a new method to measure the political bias of Facebook pages on a given country, and (ii) a detailed characterization of a comprehensive sample of these pages.

scholarly journals Neutral bots probe political bias on social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen Chen ◽  
Diogo Pacheco ◽  
Kai-Cheng Yang ◽  
Filippo Menczer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Political ◽  
User Interactions ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Political Center ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
The Right ◽  
To Receive

AbstractSocial media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. The interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers and follow more automated accounts. Conservative accounts also find themselves in denser communities and are exposed to more low-credibility content.

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.

scholarly journals Advancing children’s news media literacy: learning from the practices and experiences of young Australians

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 689-707
Author(s):  
Tanya Notley ◽  
Michael Dezuanni
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Literacy Learning ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Nationally Representative

Social media use has redefined the production, experience and consumption of news media. These changes have made verifying and trusting news content more complicated and this has led to a number of recent flashpoints for claims and counter-claims of ‘fake news’ at critical moments during elections, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Concerns regarding the actual and potential social impact of fake news led us to carry out the first nationally representative survey of young Australians’ news practices and experiences. Our analysis finds that while social media is one of young people’s preferred sources of news, they are not confident about spotting fake news online and many rarely or never check the source of news stories. Our findings raise important questions regarding the need for news media literacy education – both in schools and in the home. Therefore, we consider the historical development of news media literacy education and critique the relevance of dominant frameworks and pedagogies currently in use. We find that news media has become neglected in media literacy education in Australia over the past three decades, and we propose that current media literacy frameworks and pedagogies in use need to be rethought for the digital age.

scholarly journals Network structure and patterns of information diversity on Twitter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Conan Shore ◽  
Jiye Baek ◽  
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Network Structure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Information Diversity

Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose whom to follow, prior research suggests that social media users exist in "echo chambers" or become polarized. We seek evidence of this in a complete cross section of hyperlinks posted on Twitter, using previously validated measures of the political slant of news sources to study information diversity. Contrary to prediction, we find that the average account posts links to more politically moderate news sources than the ones they receive in their own feed. However, members of a tiny network core do exhibit cross-sectional evidence of polarization and are responsible for the majority of tweets received overall due to their popularity and activity, which could explain the widespread perception of polarization on social media.

When news media and social media meet: How Facebook users reacted to news stories about a supermarket plastic bag ban

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482095668
Author(s):  
Kim Borg ◽  
Jo Lindsay ◽  
Jim Curtis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Real Time ◽  
News Media ◽  
Plastic Pollution ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Plastic Bag ◽  
Contemporary Media

Plastic reduction policies are important for addressing plastic pollution however, the success of such policies relies on establishing new social norms. This study advances knowledge on public expressions of social norms by exploring the interplay between news media and social media in response to a new environmental policy. It is the first study to explore this phenomenon with the explicit aim of identifying and comparing information related to social norms. A content analysis was conducted in relation to the 2018 Australian supermarket plastic bag ban. Results demonstrate how social norms related to a new policy are created, reinforced and expressed in the contemporary media landscape. The interaction between news media and social media offers a window into public expressions of social norms, where social media provides a platform for civic participation in a public and real-time environment in which users can challenge the dominant narrative presented by the news media.

scholarly journals Distortions of political bias in crowdsourced misinformation flagging

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (167) ◽  
pp. 20200020
Author(s):  
Michele Coscia ◽  
Luca Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Item ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
News Source ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Current Content

Many people view news on social media, yet the production of news items online has come under fire because of the common spreading of misinformation. Social media platforms police their content in various ways. Primarily they rely on crowdsourced ‘flags’: users signal to the platform that a specific news item might be misleading and, if they raise enough of them, the item will be fact-checked. However, real-world data show that the most flagged news sources are also the most popular and—supposedly—reliable ones. In this paper, we show that this phenomenon can be explained by the unreasonable assumptions that current content policing strategies make about how the online social media environment is shaped. The most realistic assumption is that confirmation bias will prevent a user from flagging a news item if they share the same political bias as the news source producing it. We show, via agent-based simulations, that a model reproducing our current understanding of the social media environment will necessarily result in the most neutral and accurate sources receiving most flags.

Engagement in Emotional News on Social Media: Intensity and Type of Emotions

2020 ◽  
pp. 107769902095971
Author(s):  
Jihyang Choi ◽  
Sang Yup Lee ◽  
Sung Wook Ji
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Discrete Emotions ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
The Relationship

This study sheds new light on the relationship between emotion and engagement. Specifically, we investigate how the six discrete emotions that news visuals deliver, as well as the positiveness of news text, are associated with three engagement activities: sharing, commenting, and reacting. The findings show that users are less likely to share or comment on news posts that convey positive emotions, although they tend to react to such news frequently. The most prominent kind of emotion associated with user engagement activities was “sadness.” We analyzed 12,179 news stories posted on the four major U.S. newspapers’ Facebook pages.

scholarly journals Reasoning about Political Bias in Content Moderation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (09) ◽  
pp. 13669-13672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shan Jiang ◽  
Ronald E. Robertson ◽  
Christo Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Community Health ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Logical Reasoning ◽  
Hybrid Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Propensity Scoring ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
Left And Right

Content moderation, the AI-human hybrid process of removing (toxic) content from social media to promote community health, has attracted increasing attention from lawmakers due to allegations of political bias. Hitherto, this allegation has been made based on anecdotes rather than logical reasoning and empirical evidence, which motivates us to audit its validity. In this paper, we first introduce two formal criteria to measure bias (i.e., independence and separation) and their contextual meanings in content moderation, and then use YouTube as a lens to investigate if the political leaning of a video plays a role in the moderation decision for its associated comments. Our results show that when justifiable target variables (e.g., hate speech and extremeness) are controlled with propensity scoring, the likelihood of comment moderation is equal across left- and right-leaning videos.

scholarly journals DETECTING COORDINATED LINK SHARING BEHAVIOR ON FACEBOOK DURING THE ITALIAN CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Giglietto ◽  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Giada Marino
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Media Manipulation ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Sharing Behavior ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Social media, as many scholars have shown, can be used to influence political behavior through coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens. With a specific reference to Facebook, a recent study has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity aimed at fueling online circulation of specific news stories before the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections, an activity called by the authors “Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior” (CLSB). More precisely, CLSB refers to the coordinated shares of the same news articles in a very short time by networks of entities composed by Facebook pages, groups and verified public profiles. The uncertainty related to the coronavirus outbreak is a unique chance for malicious actors to leverage the anxiety of online publics to reach their goals, filling the information void with problematic content. Considering the association between coordination, media manipulation, and problematic information, the entities involved in coordinated online activities represent a privileged perspective on these phenomena. Thus, against the backdrop of the literature and the already conducted studies, this proposal will discuss Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior in the context of the coronavirus outbreak informational void, analyzing network mutations over time and the content strategies used to exploit the ambiguity associated with the topic.

scholarly journals What do people learn from following the news? A diary study on the influence of media use on knowledge of current news stories

2020 ◽  
pp. 026732312097872
Author(s):  
Kathleen Beckers ◽  
Peter Van Aelst ◽  
Pascal Verhoest ◽  
Leen d’Haenens
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
Diary Study ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Audiovisual Media ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Time Diary ◽  
Current Affairs

One of the main functions of news media in democracies is informing the citizenry on day-to-day affairs. However, the way in which citizens gather news has changed as nowadays people have more opportunities than ever before to adapt their media consumption based on their preferences. One of the major game changers was the introduction of social media. This raises the question to what extent traditional media still contribute to people’s knowledge of current affairs. Using a time-diary study in the Flemish media context, we investigate the influence of different forms of news consumption on current news knowledge. We conclude that traditional (print and audiovisual) media, including popular outlets, continue to be the major contributors to people’s knowledge about current affairs and that social media hardly contribute at all.

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