Suchergebnisse

This study maps the Rohingya diaspora's digital engagement on Facebook and explores how their participation has transformed over the years. Using the CrowdTangle analytics platform, this mixed-methods study presents the Rohingya community's collective engagement on Facebook across six years, from January 2017 to December 2022. It comprises 47 Rohingya diaspora FB pages that published 34,905 posts and received nearly 8 million user interactions. Revealing their yearly transformation in interactions on Facebook, this study uncovers their contextual embodiment—within the increasingly complex and ever-changing regional and global socio-political landscape. Three key insights emerged from our findings. First, memories of loss, suffering, and longing for home intertwine in Rohingya transnational digital connectivity. In this remembrance process, Arakan (Rakhine) remains the place of reference and the center of gravity in their multi-layered identity formation and political mobilization. Second, as a gateway to seek global attention and articulate their political grievances, Rohingyas compose a coherent, unified, and human rights-based discourse on Facebook. Through such framing, they create an oppositional consciousness, drawing positive attention to their plight and the injustice they have endured for decades. Third, Islam, Muslim solidarity, and the narrative of Muslim victimhood emerge as indisputable markers in their identity (re)construction and manifesting political resistance. Anchoring on Islam, they build bridges between the scattered diaspora members and transcend their local struggle to the global audience, cementing the nexus between their Muslim identity and discrimination by the Buddhist-majority Myanmar government.

This descriptive study investigates political mobilization and user engagement patterns on Facebook and associated partisan and gender discrepancies. It focuses on Switzerland, where political actors frequently seek to mobilize and shape citizens' opinions before direct-democratic voting on wide-ranging policy issues. Using digital trace data from CrowdTangle, the analysis focuses on the posting frequency and received user interactions of 770 Swiss political actors' Facebook pages. The analysis period covers 20 months, from November 2019 to July 2021, during which five popular votes occurred, and the sampled FB pages published more than 226,000 posts and received more than 18,000,000 user interactions. A descriptive quantitative analysis and a multiple regression analysis revealed an overall skewed pattern: Mobilization and user engagement are driven by small subsets of highly active and interacted-with FB pages. A few FB pages of the right-wing Swiss People's Party and male politicians receive highly disproportionate user engagement – relative to more centrist parties and female politicians – but also relative to their electoral share in the national parliament. The results show that only a few dominant political voices are widely heard on Facebook, even if many speak. These insights are of interest beyond Switzerland, as Facebook and other social media platforms shape political discourse across liberal democracies.

This article explores the influence of social media giant Facebook on the journalistic field by examining how news organizations responded to Facebook's algorithm tweak, announced in June 2014, that prioritized videos directly uploaded to the social media platform. In announcing the tweak, Facebook, an agent external to the journalistic field, did not just change its own internal rules but also imposed them on users, including news organizations traditionally governed by the journalistic field's own set of rules. Based on large-scale posting activity data collected from 232 Facebook Pages operated by major news organizations in the United States, this study found that most news organizations complied with Facebook's updated rules on Native Videos by significantly increasing their social video production, opening up the journalistic field to the influence of an agent external to journalism. But while digital-native and broadcast news publishers were more responsive in adapting to the tweak, print brands were slower to respond.