Is news media sharing an active framing process? Examining whether individual tweets retain news media frames about climate change

Abstract

Social network sites have become a primary tool for consuming and sharing news. Typically, sharing a news media article on social media involves two pieces of information: the news media frame and the individual’s commentary. With framing as an active, iterative process, we examine the extent to which individuals replicate or reframe when sharing news about climate change to Twitter. First, we conducted a framing analysis of news about climate change. Then, we assessed whether tweets sharing the news media articles in our framing analysis (n = 9,557) retained or reframed the original frame. Results show 74.64% of the tweets were not a direct replication of the original news media frame. Furthermore, the likelihood that an individual chose to reframe depended on the frame of the original article. Overall, our study illustrates how a constructionist framing approach can be applied to understand the dynamic nature of news sharing on Twitter.