Suchergebnisse

We use a unique, nationally representative, survey of UK social media users ( n = 2,005) to identify the main factors associated with a specific and particularly troubling form of sharing behavior: the amplification of exaggerated and false news. Our conceptual framework and research design advance research in two ways. First, we pinpoint and measure behavior that is intended to spread, rather than correct or merely draw attention to, misleading information. Second, we test this behavior's links to a wider array of explanatory factors than previously considered in research on mis-/disinformation. Our main findings are that a substantial minority—a tenth—of UK social media users regularly engages in the amplification of exaggerated or false news on UK social media. This behavior is associated with four distinctive, individual-level factors: (1) increased use of Instagram, but not other public social media platforms, for political news; (2) what we term identity-performative sharing motivations; (3) negative affective orientation toward social media as a space for political news; and (4) right-wing ideology. We discuss the implications of these findings and the need for further research on how platform affordances and norms, emotions, and ideology matter for the diffusion of dis-/misinformation.

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.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal New Media and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769689 ; 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.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media on 26 May 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08838151.2017.1309415. ; Dual screening during televised election debates is a new domain in which political elites and journalists seek to influence audience attitudes and behavior. But to what extent do non-elite dual screeners seek to influence others, particularly their social media followers, social media users in general, and even politicians and journalists? And how does this behavior affect short- and longer-term engagement with election campaigns? Using unique, event-based, panel survey data from the main 2015 UK general election debate (Wave 1 = 2,351; Wave 2 = 1,168) we reveal the conditions under which people experience agency, empowerment, and engagement now that social media have reconfigured broadcast political television.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: VACCARI, C., CHADWICK, A. and O'LOUGHLIN, B., 2015. Dual screening the political: media events, social media, and citizen engagement. Journal of Communication, 65 (6), pp. 1041 - 1061, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12187. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. ; Dual screening—the complex bundle of practices that involve integrating, and switching across and between, live broadcast media and social medi—is now routine for many citizens during important political media events. But do these practices shape political engagement, and if so, why? We devised a unique research design combining a large-scale Twitter dataset and a custom-built panel survey focusing on the broadcast party leaders' debates held during the 2014 European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom. We find that relatively active, "lean-forward" practices, such as commenting live on social media as the debate unfolded, and engaging with conversations via Twitter hashtags, have the strongest and most consistent positive associations with political engagement.

Most research into online misinformation has investigated its direct effects—the impact it may have on citizens' beliefs and behavior. Much less attention has been paid to how citizens themselves make sense of misinformation as a broader social problem. We integrate theories of narrative, identity, cultural capital, and social distinction to examine how people construct the problem of misinformation and their orientation to it. We show how people engage in everyday ontological narratives of social distinction. These involve making a variety of discursive moves to position one's "taste" in information consumption as superior to others constructed as lower in a social hierarchy. This serves to enhance social status by separating oneself from misinformation, which is presented as "other people's problem." We argue that these narratives have significant implications not only for citizens' vigilance toward misinformation but also their receptiveness to interventions by policymakers, fact-checkers, news organizations, and media educators.

Personal messaging platforms are hugely popular and often implicated in the spread of misinformation. We explore an unexamined practice on them: when users create "group rules" to prevent misinformation entering everyday interactions. Our data are a subset of in-depth interviews with 33 participants in a larger program of longitudinal qualitative fieldwork ( N = 102) we conducted over 16 months. Participants could also donate examples of misinformation via our customized smartphone application. We find that some participants created group rules to mitigate what they saw as messaging's harmful affordances. In the context of personalized trust relationships, these affordances were perceived as making it likely that misinformation would harm social ties. Rules reduce the vulnerability and can stimulate metacommunication that, over time, fosters norms of collective reflection and epistemic vigilance, although the impact differs subtly according to group size and membership. Subject to further exploration, group rulemaking could reduce the spread of online misinformation.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics on 2015-12-21, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138860766

This book chapter is closed access. ; The ongoing production of staggeringly huge volumes of digital data is a ubiquitous part of life in the early twenty-first century. A large proportion of this data is text. This development has serious implications for almost all scholarly endeavour. It is now possible for researchers from a wide range of disciplines to use text mining techniques and software tools in their daily practice. In our own field of political communication, the prospect of cheap access to what, how, and to whom very large numbers of citizens communicate in social media environments provides opportunities that are often too good to miss as we seek to understand how and why citizens think and feel the way they do about policies, political organizations, and political events. But what are the methods and tools on offer, how should they best be used, and what sorts of ethical issues are raised by their use? In this article we proceed as follows. First, we provide a basic definition of text mining. Second, we provide examples of how text mining has been used recently in a diverse range of analytical contexts, from business to media to politics. Third, we discuss the challenges of conducting text mining in online social media environments, focusing on issues such as the problem of gaining access to social media data, research ethics, and the integrity of the data corpuses that are available from social media companies. Fourth, we present a basic but comprehensive survey of the text mining tools that are currently available. Finally, we present two brief case studies of the application of text mining in the authors' field of political communication. We conclude with some observations about the proper place of text mining in social science research.

This working paper is closed access. This paper is available at http://www.newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/working-papers-1/. ; The ongoing production of staggeringly huge volumes of digital data is a ubiquitous part of life in the early twenty-first century. A large proportion of this data is text. This development has serious implications for almost all scholarly endeavour. It is now possible for researchers from a wide range of disciplines to use text mining techniques and software tools in their daily practice. In our own field of political communication, the prospect of cheap access to what, how, and to whom very large numbers of citizens communicate in social media environments provides opportunities that are often too good to miss as we seek to understand how and why citizens think and feel the way they do about policies, political organizations, and political events. But what are the methods and tools on offer, how should they best be used, and what sorts of ethical issues are raised by their use? In this article we proceed as follows. First, we provide a basic definition of text mining. Second, we provide examples of how text mining has been used recently in a diverse range of analytical contexts, from business to media to politics. Third, we discuss the challenges of conducting text mining in online social media environments, focusing on issues such as the problem of gaining access to social media data, research ethics, and the integrity of the data corpuses that are available from social media companies. Fourth, we present a basic but comprehensive survey of the text mining tools that are currently available. Finally, we present two brief case studies of the application of text mining in the authors' field of political communication. We conclude with some observations about the proper place of text mining in social science research.

This paper was published in the journal Journalism and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918762848. ; How journalists construct the authority of their sources is an essential part of how news comes to have power in politics and how political actors legitimize their roles to publics. Focusing on economic policy reporting and a dataset of 133 hours of mainstream broadcast news from the five-week 2015 U.K. general election campaign, we theorize and empirically illustrate how the construction of expert source authority works. To build our theory we integrate four strands of thought: an important, though in recent years neglected, tradition in the sociology of news concerned with "primary definers"; the underdeveloped literature on expert think tanks and media; recent work in journalism studies advocating a relational approach to authority; and elements from the discursive psychology approach to the construction of facticity in interactive settings. Our central contribution is a new perspective on source authority: the identification of behaviors that are key to how the interactions between journalists and elite political actors actively construct the elevated authoritative status of expert sources. We call these behaviors authority signaling. We show how authority signaling works to legitimize the power of the U.K.'s most important policy think tank and discuss the implications of this process.

Understanding the growth of entrepreneurial regions and the extent to which the actors in the triple helix model are dominant at particular stages in development is the theme of this article. Both Oxfordshire and the Cambridge sub-region are important high-tech economies dominated by historic universities, Oxford and Cambridge (often referred to collectively as Oxbridge), two of the world's leading research universities. As entrepreneurial regions, however, they differ in a number of respects. In the article different dynamics leading to the inception, implementation, consolidation and renewal of regions characterized by very high levels of technology-based entrepreneurship are explored. It is argued that, although they are leading locations of multiple clusters of high-tech firms, they could have been more successful in creating more and bigger firms. It is proposed that part of the explanation lies in the relative lack of engagement of their major assets (the universities) in leading local economic development.

We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination programme in the UK. Vaccine hesitancy is a longstanding problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the UK had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults (n=5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political attitudes, media diet for getting news about Covid-19, and intention to use social media and personal messaging apps to encourage or discourage vaccination against Covid-19. Cluster analysis identified six distinct media diet groups: news avoiders, mainstream/official news samplers, super seekers, omnivores, the social media dependent, and the TV dependent. We assessed whether these media diets, together with key attitudes, including Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy mentality, and the news-finds-me attitude (meaning giving less priority to active monitoring of news, and relying more on one's online networks of friends for information) predict the intention to encourage or discourage vaccination. Overall, super-seeker and omnivorous media diets are more likely than other media diets to be associated with the online encouragement of vaccination. Combinations of a) news avoidance and high levels of the news-finds-me attitude and b) social media dependence and high levels of conspiracy mentality are most likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination. In the direct statistical model, a TV-dependent media diet is more likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination, but the moderation model shows that a TV-dependent diet most strongly attenuates the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and discouraging vaccination. Our findings support public health communication based on four main methods. First, direct contact, through the post, workplace, or community structures, and through phone counselling via local health services, could reach the news avoiders. Second, TV public information advertisements should point to authoritative information sources, such as NHS and other public health websites, which should then feature clear and simple ways for people to share material among their online social networks. Third, informative social media campaigns will provide super seekers with good resources to share, while also encouraging the social media dependent to browse away from social media platforms and visit reliable and authoritative online sources. Fourth, social media companies should expand and intensify their removal of vaccine disinformation and anti-vax accounts, and such efforts should be monitored by well-resourced, independent organizations.