Suchergebnisse

We analyze patterns of digital news consumption before and after a "link tax" was introduced in Spain. This new legislation imposed a copyright fee for showing snippets of content created by newspapers and resulted in the shutdown of Google News Spain. The Spanish copyright law is a precedent to the Copyright Directive currently submitted to the European Parliament, which is planning to impose a similar "link tax." We offer empirical evidence that can help evaluate the impact of that sort of intervention. We analyze data tracking news consumption behavior to assess changes in audience reach and audience fragmentation. We show that the law has no discernible impact on reach, but we identify an increase in the fragmentation of news consumption.

Content moderation on social media is at the center of public and academic debate. In this study, we advance our understanding on which type of election-related content gets suspended by social media platforms. For this, we assess the behavior and content shared by suspended accounts during the most important elections in Europe in 2017 (in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany). We identify significant differences when we compare the behavior and content shared by Twitter suspended accounts with all other active accounts, including a focus on amplifying divisive issues like immigration and religion and systematic activities increasing the visibility of specific political figures (often but not always on the right). Our analysis suggests that suspended accounts were overwhelmingly human operated and no more likely than other accounts to share "fake news." This study sheds light on the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have increasingly raised contentious debates, and equally importantly on the integrity and dynamics of political discussion on social media during major political events.

This research analyzes how different types of frames adopted by news organizations and social media affected the support for protests against austerity measures in Spain. We pay special attention to the individual understandings of the crises based on materialistic grievances and nonmaterialistic accounts of the economic crises. We identified frames using a supervised approach and a data set of 2 million tweets gathered during the major demonstrations of the Indignados Movement between 2011 and 2013. Our second data set included the news-related content published by the top Spanish newspapers, in terms of circulation, during those demonstrations. We found that support for antiausterity protests was conditioned by understandings of the crisis. Frames addressing the political system were negatively related to the support for protests against austerity measures, as compared with those referring to the crisis as an economic matter. In addition, more challenging and controversial frames generated lower acceptance of the protests among the population than those that primed social problems.

In this RISJ Factsheet, we study Indian news audience distribution across Facebook and Twitter and compare it to that of the open web. To this end, we analyse data from the recently concluded Indian General Election which took place over multiple phases between 11 April and 19 May 2019, and broke the record for being the largest democratic exercise in the world. More than five thousand candidates ran for the 543 available seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, and nine hundred million eligible voters were called to the polls, of which over 67% turned up to vote. We find that while vernacular or regional newspapers dominated the provision of news on Facebook, digital-born as well as legacy national level outlets were more active in posting news updates on Twitter. Audiences on Facebook as well as Twitter however were more engaged with digital-born outlets, both national as well as regional. Finally, we find no evidence of fragmentation in how the online Indian audience consumed news during the election period.

Democratic politics builds on both clear differences and shared common ground. While the rise of digital media may have enabled more differences to be articulated, common ground is often seen as threatened by fragmentation of political debate, which some see as driven by news media. The relative importance of political actors (parties and politicians) in driving fragmentation has received less attention. In this paper, we compare how news media and political actors contribute to the fragmentation of online political debate on the basis of analysis of almost half a million election-related tweets collected during the 2017 French, German, and U.K. national elections. We employ a structural topic model to reduce online political debate to networks of topic overlap. Across the three countries with different political and media systems, we find news media are by far the most important actors in terms of creating and maintaining a common space of online political debate on Twitter. Our results also show that political actors, with some variation from country to country, contribute more to fragmentation as they focus on different topics while articulating clear differences. These findings underline the importance of complementing structural analysis of the rise of digital and social media with analysis of how important elite actors like news media and political parties/candidates use these media in different ways. Overall, we show how at least on Twitter, across three different countries with different media systems and political systems, news media create connection that contributes to commonality while political actors lay out clear differences that drive fragmentation.

Open Access Article. ; Targeting the hypoxia response pathway and angiogenesis are two promising therapeutic strategies for cancer treatment. Their use as single strategies has important limitations. Thus, development of combined regimens has become an important step toward improving therapeutic efficacy. Also, non-invasive monitoring of the response to targeted biological therapies, as well as determination of the optimal schedule for combination regimens has become an active field of research over the last five years, with relevance for both preclinical and clinical settings. Here, we used an optical imaging method to non-invasively monitor the functional changes in HIF activity in response to antiangiogenic treatment in a xenograft model of human ovarian carcinoma. A bioluminescent reporter construct containing nine copies of the hypoxia response element upstream of the luciferase gene (9xHRE-luciferase) was characterized in vitro in a panel of tumor cell lines and in vivo in a subcutaneous xenograft model of ovarian carcinoma by means of optical imaging. We showed that in OVCAR-3 subcutaneous xenografts, the most abrupt change in the HIF functional reporter occurs before the onset of massive tumor growth. However, this system failed to detect hypoxia induced upon antiangiogenic treatment due to the compensating effects of increased hypoxia and decreased tumor cell viability caused by imbalanced neovascularization vs. tumor expansion. Therefore, the readout based on HIF functional reporter could be conditioned by the dynamics of tumor growth and angiogenesis, which is highly variable depending on the tumor type, tumor model and stage of progression. ; This study was supported by grants from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SAF2008-03147 to LdP and SAF2010-19256 to BJ), Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (S-SAL-0311_2006) and the 7th Research Framework Programme of the European Union (METOXIA, project ref. HEALTH-F2-2009-222741). B.M.P. and V.G. have been supported by a grant from the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (S-SAL-0311_2006). ; Peer Reviewed