Meysam Alizadeh, F. Gilardi, E. Hoes, K. J. Klüser, M. Kubli, Nahema Marchal, Donald J. Trump
Content moderation — the regulation of the material that users create and disseminate online — is an important activity for all social media platforms. While routine, this practice raises significant questions linked to democratic accountability and civil liberties. Following the decision of many platforms to ban Donald J. Trump in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, content moderation has increasingly become a politically contested issue. This paper studies that process with a focus on the public discourse on Twitter. The analysis includes over 9 million tweets and retweets posted by over 3 million unique users between January 2020 and April 2021. First, the salience of content moderation was driven by left-leaning users, and "Section 230" was the most important topic across the ideological spectrum. Second, stance towards Section 230 was relatively volatile and increasingly polarized. These findings highlight relevant elements of the ongoing process of political contestation surrounding this issue, and provide a descriptive foundation to understand the politics of content moderation.
内容审核——对用户在网上创建和传播的内容进行监管——是所有社交媒体平台的一项重要活动。这种做法虽然是例行公事，但却引发了与民主问责制和公民自由有关的重大问题。在2021年1月美国国会大厦遭到袭击后，许多平台决定禁止唐纳德·j·特朗普(Donald J. Trump)，内容审核越来越成为一个有政治争议的问题。本文以Twitter上的公共话语为重点研究这一过程。该分析包括2020年1月至2021年4月期间300多万独立用户发布的900多万条推文和转发。首先，内容审核的重要性是由左倾用户推动的，而“第230条”是跨意识形态范围最重要的话题。第二，对第230条的立场相对不稳定，而且越来越两极化。这些发现突出了围绕这一问题正在进行的政治争论过程的相关因素，并为理解内容节制的政治提供了描述性的基础。
{"title":"Content Moderation As a Political Issue: The Twitter Discourse Around Trump's Ban","authors":"Meysam Alizadeh, F. Gilardi, E. Hoes, K. J. Klüser, M. Kubli, Nahema Marchal, Donald J. Trump","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.023","url":null,"abstract":"Content moderation — the regulation of the material that users create and disseminate online — is an important activity for all social media platforms. While routine, this practice raises significant questions linked to democratic accountability and civil liberties. Following the decision of many platforms to ban Donald J. Trump in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, content moderation has increasingly become a politically contested issue. This paper studies that process with a focus on the public discourse on Twitter. The analysis includes over 9 million tweets and retweets posted by over 3 million unique users between January 2020 and April 2021. First, the salience of content moderation was driven by left-leaning users, and \"Section 230\" was the most important topic across the ideological spectrum. Second, stance towards Section 230 was relatively volatile and increasingly polarized. These findings highlight relevant elements of the ongoing process of political contestation surrounding this issue, and provide a descriptive foundation to understand the politics of content moderation.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"117 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78090397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study examines the Facebook pages of all four telecom operators in Bangladesh to understand their communication strategies on Facebook and their customers’ engagement patterns. More specifically, this article explores the companies’ communication strategies deployed in terms of five aspects: i) visual vs. textual content; ii) cultural elements; iii) purposes of posts; iv) intimacy with customers; and v) use of different languages. This research also explores customers’ engagement patterns relating to the number of reactions (e.g., likes), comments, and shares. Analyzing their Facebook posts from 2013–2017, this quantitative descriptive study finds that the corporations used Facebook not only to disseminate information but also to build communities around their brands by embedding visual content and cultural elements heavily in status messages. This article also discusses the real-world implications of these findings.
{"title":"Building Relationships with Customers: How Corporations Use Facebook in Bangladesh","authors":"M. Yousef, Mohammad Ali","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.022","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the Facebook pages of all four telecom operators in Bangladesh to understand their communication strategies on Facebook and their customers’ engagement patterns. More specifically, this article explores the companies’ communication strategies deployed in terms of five aspects: i) visual vs. textual content; ii) cultural elements; iii) purposes of posts; iv) intimacy with customers; and v) use of different languages. This research also explores customers’ engagement patterns relating to the number of reactions (e.g., likes), comments, and shares. Analyzing their Facebook posts from 2013–2017, this quantitative descriptive study finds that the corporations used Facebook not only to disseminate information but also to build communities around their brands by embedding visual content and cultural elements heavily in status messages. This article also discusses the real-world implications of these findings.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72970848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marcio Moretto, Pablo Ortellado, G. Kessler, Gabriel Vommaro, Juan Carlos Rodríguez-Raga, J. Luna, Eduarth Heinen, L. Cely, Sergio Y. Toro
A growing body of literature has noted an age pattern in the sharing of false news in social media, with older people sharing more often misinformation than younger users. In this article we supplement this literature by documenting two distinct but complementary phenomena: Facebook users share more content as they get older regardless of whether it is political; and that this increment in sharing activity as age increases is more intense with political and partisan URLs. Based on the Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Data Set, a vast Facebook database with demographic information of those who saw and shared links on Facebook in 46 countries, we investigate the impact of age on link-sharing activity. We found that in 43 countries, the average age of people who shared links was considerably higher than the age of those who saw the links. In a more detailed study, with Facebook users in South America, we find that the average age increases consecutively in the sharing of non-political content, in the sharing of political content, in the sharing of partisan sites and in the sharing of right-leaning partisan sites.
{"title":"People are more engaged on Facebook as they get older, especially in politics: evidence from users in 46 countries","authors":"Marcio Moretto, Pablo Ortellado, G. Kessler, Gabriel Vommaro, Juan Carlos Rodríguez-Raga, J. Luna, Eduarth Heinen, L. Cely, Sergio Y. Toro","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.018","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of literature has noted an age pattern in the sharing of false news in social media, with older people sharing more often misinformation than younger users. In this article we supplement this literature by documenting two distinct but complementary phenomena: Facebook users share more content as they get older regardless of whether it is political; and that this increment in sharing activity as age increases is more intense with political and partisan URLs. Based on the Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Data Set, a vast Facebook database with demographic information of those who saw and shared links on Facebook in 46 countries, we investigate the impact of age on link-sharing activity. We found that in 43 countries, the average age of people who shared links was considerably higher than the age of those who saw the links. In a more detailed study, with Facebook users in South America, we find that the average age increases consecutively in the sharing of non-political content, in the sharing of political content, in the sharing of partisan sites and in the sharing of right-leaning partisan sites.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73713328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How did the 2020 coronavirus pandemic affect people's online news consumption? To understand this, we present a comparative analysis of data on an estimated 905B desktop and mobile visits to news outlets, and 54B Facebook engagements, generated by news outlets in the US, UK, France, and Germany between 2017 and 2021. We find that in 2020 online news consumption increased. Trustworthy news outlets benefited the most from the increase in web traffic. In the UK trustworthy news outlets also benefited the most from the increase in Facebook engagement, but in other countries both trustworthy and untrustworthy news outlets benefited from the increase in Facebook engagement. Overall, untrustworthy news outlets captured 2.3% of web traffic and 14.0% of Facebook engagement, while news outlets regularly publishing false content accounted for 1.4% of web traffic and 6.8% of Facebook engagement. People largely turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
{"title":"Quantifying the “infodemic”: People turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic","authors":"Sacha Altay, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, R. Fletcher","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.020","url":null,"abstract":"How did the 2020 coronavirus pandemic affect people's online news consumption? To understand this, we present a comparative analysis of data on an estimated 905B desktop and mobile visits to news outlets, and 54B Facebook engagements, generated by news outlets in the US, UK, France, and Germany between 2017 and 2021. We find that in 2020 online news consumption increased. Trustworthy news outlets benefited the most from the increase in web traffic. In the UK trustworthy news outlets also benefited the most from the increase in Facebook engagement, but in other countries both trustworthy and untrustworthy news outlets benefited from the increase in Facebook engagement. Overall, untrustworthy news outlets captured 2.3% of web traffic and 14.0% of Facebook engagement, while news outlets regularly publishing false content accounted for 1.4% of web traffic and 6.8% of Facebook engagement. People largely turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74063648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social media platforms such as Facebook enable citizens to participate in politics by engaging with content from parties and politicians. Most research has described these activites by means of survey self-reports, smaller sample studies which combined surveys and digital trace data, or larger-scale aggregate digital trace data. The current literature lacks a large-scale descriptive account of individual users' interactions with political content. We analyze a large-scale collection of individual-level Facebook user data from the German federal election year 2017. The data contain millions of interactions by over 2.5 million unique users on 320 Facebook pages of major parties in Germany. They include almost all possible ways to publicly interact with content on these pages and as such cannot be collected today due to newer access restrictions. A large share of users participated only once, especially on the top politicians' pages, or interacted only with a single page. However, we also found a sizeable group of users who were active on many different pages even across party boundaries, and that these users were responsible for a majority of comments and reactions on almost all pages. In addition, there were substantial differences in user participation on the main national party pages and the ones of top politicians on the one hand, and the less prominent pages on the other hand. Our large-scale quantitative description provides context for previous and future smaller-scale in-depth analyses.
{"title":"Individual users' participation on political Facebook pages","authors":"Yannick Winkler, Marko Bachl, Michael Scharkow","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.019","url":null,"abstract":"Social media platforms such as Facebook enable citizens to participate in politics by engaging with content from parties and politicians. Most research has described these activites by means of survey self-reports, smaller sample studies which combined surveys and digital trace data, or larger-scale aggregate digital trace data. The current literature lacks a large-scale descriptive account of individual users' interactions with political content. We analyze a large-scale collection of individual-level Facebook user data from the German federal election year 2017. The data contain millions of interactions by over 2.5 million unique users on 320 Facebook pages of major parties in Germany. They include almost all possible ways to publicly interact with content on these pages and as such cannot be collected today due to newer access restrictions. A large share of users participated only once, especially on the top politicians' pages, or interacted only with a single page. However, we also found a sizeable group of users who were active on many different pages even across party boundaries, and that these users were responsible for a majority of comments and reactions on almost all pages. In addition, there were substantial differences in user participation on the main national party pages and the ones of top politicians on the one hand, and the less prominent pages on the other hand. Our large-scale quantitative description provides context for previous and future smaller-scale in-depth analyses.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"2016 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88273279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Can decentralized, digitally-enabled movements sustain solidarity over time? What is the role of digital media in such a process? Existing studies point to the tendency of such movements towards fragmentation. We focus on the case the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong and one of the primary digital platforms for mobilization, LIHKG. We argue that LIHKG users maintain the dominance of solidarity through a strategy of normative crowding out, whereby users strategically promote solidaristic rhetoric and emotions while sanctioning divisive ones. Empirically, we analyze millions of discussion posts on LIHKG with rich text and emoji data. We first document the rising trend of online solidaristic contents despite contemporaneous tactical radicalization. Regression analyses further show that such a pattern can be produced by user-driven mechanisms in sanctioning solidaristic and divisive contents. This study has implications on the role of digital media and the sustainability of decentralized collective action.
{"title":"Decentralized yet Unifying: Digital Media, Normative Crowding Out, and Solidarity in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Movement","authors":"B. Leung, Yuan Hsiao, Kiran Garimella","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.017","url":null,"abstract":"Can decentralized, digitally-enabled movements sustain solidarity over time? What is the role of digital media in such a process? Existing studies point to the tendency of such movements towards fragmentation. We focus on the case the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong and one of the primary digital platforms for mobilization, LIHKG. We argue that LIHKG users maintain the dominance of solidarity through a strategy of normative crowding out, whereby users strategically promote solidaristic rhetoric and emotions while sanctioning divisive ones. Empirically, we analyze millions of discussion posts on LIHKG with rich text and emoji data. We first document the rising trend of online solidaristic contents despite contemporaneous tactical radicalization. Regression analyses further show that such a pattern can be produced by user-driven mechanisms in sanctioning solidaristic and divisive contents. This study has implications on the role of digital media and the sustainability of decentralized collective action.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83948176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Attention to online news is highly concentrated and increasingly shaped by platforms including search engines, social media, and aggregators that many use to find and access online news, potentially leaving some publishers highly reliant on platforms, raising the possibility of what has been called "platformization" or "infrastructural capture". We use passive tracking data from the UK to measure how concentrated attention to online news is across different types of access (direct, social media, search engines, aggregators) and to examine how reliant different individual news publishers are on platform referrals. We find that direct traffic to news sites is highly concentrated, whereas all the distributed forms of access analyzed have much lower levels of concentration. While we find that platform referrals are important for most publishers, we identify different profiles in terms of the volume of and reliance on referrals, suggesting that while some are very dependent on platforms, others are not. Overall, we find that while platforms themselves are part of the winner-takes-most concentration of attention overall on the internet, they simultaneously seem to contribute to less concentrated markets for attention to online news.
{"title":"Concentration of online news traffic and publishers' reliance on platform referrals: Evidence from passive tracking data in the UK","authors":"R. Nielsen, R. Fletcher","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.015","url":null,"abstract":"Attention to online news is highly concentrated and increasingly shaped by platforms including search engines, social media, and aggregators that many use to find and access online news, potentially leaving some publishers highly reliant on platforms, raising the possibility of what has been called \"platformization\" or \"infrastructural capture\". We use passive tracking data from the UK to measure how concentrated attention to online news is across different types of access (direct, social media, search engines, aggregators) and to examine how reliant different individual news publishers are on platform referrals. We find that direct traffic to news sites is highly concentrated, whereas all the distributed forms of access analyzed have much lower levels of concentration. While we find that platform referrals are important for most publishers, we identify different profiles in terms of the volume of and reliance on referrals, suggesting that while some are very dependent on platforms, others are not. Overall, we find that while platforms themselves are part of the winner-takes-most concentration of attention overall on the internet, they simultaneously seem to contribute to less concentrated markets for attention to online news.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84580254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Trilling, Juhi Kulshrestha, Claes H. de Vreese, Denis Halagiera, J. Jakubowski, J. Möller, C. Puschmann, Agnieszka Stępińska, Sebastian Stier, Cristian Vaccari
How is political news shared online? This fundamental question for political communication research in today’s news ecology is still poorly understood. In particular, very little is known about whether and how news sharing differs from news viewing. Based on a unique dataset of ≈ 870,000 URLs shared ≈ 100 million times on Facebook, grouped by countries, age brackets, and months, we study the correlates of viewing versus sharing of political versus non-political news. We first identify websites that at least occasionally contain news items, and then analyze metrics of the news items published on these websites. We enrich the dataset with natural language processing and super- vised machine learning. We find that political news items are viewed less than non-political news items, but are shared more than one would expect based on their views. Furthermore, the source of a news item and textual features, which are often studied in clickbait research and in commercial A/B testing, matter. Our findings are conditional on age, but are very similar across four different countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Poland). While our research design does not allow for causal claims, our findings suggest that future work is well-advised to both theoretically and methodologically differentiate between factors that may explain (a) viewing versus sharing of news, and (b) political versus non-political news.
{"title":"Is sharing just a function of viewing? The sharing of political and non-political news on Facebook","authors":"D. Trilling, Juhi Kulshrestha, Claes H. de Vreese, Denis Halagiera, J. Jakubowski, J. Möller, C. Puschmann, Agnieszka Stępińska, Sebastian Stier, Cristian Vaccari","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000How is political news shared online? This fundamental question for political communication research in today’s news ecology is still poorly understood. In particular, very little is known about whether and how news sharing differs from news viewing. Based on a unique dataset of ≈ 870,000 URLs shared ≈ 100 million times on Facebook, grouped by countries, age brackets, and months, we study the correlates of viewing versus sharing of political versus non-political news. We first identify websites that at least occasionally contain news items, and then analyze metrics of the news items published on these websites. We enrich the dataset with natural language processing and super- vised machine learning. We find that political news items are viewed less than non-political news items, but are shared more than one would expect based on their views. Furthermore, the source of a news item and textual features, which are often studied in clickbait research and in commercial A/B testing, matter. Our findings are conditional on age, but are very similar across four different countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Poland). While our research design does not allow for causal claims, our findings suggest that future work is well-advised to both theoretically and methodologically differentiate between factors that may explain (a) viewing versus sharing of news, and (b) political versus non-political news.\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"23 3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83575766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Andrew Beers, Joseph S. Schafer, Isabella García-Camargo, Emma S. Spiro, Kate Starbird
This paper introduces and presents a first analysis of a uniquely curated dataset of misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election. Previous research on misinformation—an umbrella term for false and misleading content—has largely focused either on broad categories, using a finite set of keywords to cover a complex topic, or on a few, focused case studies, with increased precision but limited scope. Our approach, by comparison, leverages real-time reports collected from September through November 2020 to develop a comprehensive dataset of tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories from the 2020 U.S. election (our ElectionMisinfo2020 dataset), 307 of which sowed doubt in the legitimacy of the election. By relying on real-time incidents and streaming data, we generate a curated dataset that not only provides more granularity than a large collection based on a finite number of search terms, but also an improved opportunity for generalization compared to a small set of case studies. Though the emphasis is on misleading content, not all of the tweets linked to a misinformation story are false: some are questions, opinions, corrections, or factual content that nonetheless contributes to misperceptions. Along with a detailed description of the data, this paper provides an analysis of a critical subset of election-delegitimizing misinformation in terms of size, content, temporal diffusion, and partisanship. We label key ideological clusters of accounts within interaction networks, describe common misinformation narratives, and identify those accounts which repeatedly spread misinformation. We document the asymmetry of misinformation spread: accounts associated with support for President Biden shared stories in ElectionMisinfo2020 far less than accounts supporting his opponent. That asymmetry remained among the accounts who were repeatedly influential in the spread of misleading content that sowed doubt in the election: all but two of the top 100 ‘repeat spreader’ accounts were supporters of then-President Trump. These findings support the implementation and enforcement of ‘strike rules’ on social media platforms, directly addressing the outsized role of repeat spreaders.
{"title":"Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization","authors":"Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Andrew Beers, Joseph S. Schafer, Isabella García-Camargo, Emma S. Spiro, Kate Starbird","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.013","url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces and presents a first analysis of a uniquely curated dataset of misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election. Previous research on misinformation—an umbrella term for false and misleading content—has largely focused either on broad categories, using a finite set of keywords to cover a complex topic, or on a few, focused case studies, with increased precision but limited scope. Our approach, by comparison, leverages real-time reports collected from September through November 2020 to develop a comprehensive dataset of tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories from the 2020 U.S. election (our ElectionMisinfo2020 dataset), 307 of which sowed doubt in the legitimacy of the election. By relying on real-time incidents and streaming data, we generate a curated dataset that not only provides more granularity than a large collection based on a finite number of search terms, but also an improved opportunity for generalization compared to a small set of case studies. Though the emphasis is on misleading content, not all of the tweets linked to a misinformation story are false: some are questions, opinions, corrections, or factual content that nonetheless contributes to misperceptions. Along with a detailed description of the data, this paper provides an analysis of a critical subset of election-delegitimizing misinformation in terms of size, content, temporal diffusion, and partisanship. We label key ideological clusters of accounts within interaction networks, describe common misinformation narratives, and identify those accounts which repeatedly spread misinformation. We document the asymmetry of misinformation spread: accounts associated with support for President Biden shared stories in ElectionMisinfo2020 far less than accounts supporting his opponent. That asymmetry remained among the accounts who were repeatedly influential in the spread of misleading content that sowed doubt in the election: all but two of the top 100 ‘repeat spreader’ accounts were supporters of then-President Trump. These findings support the implementation and enforcement of ‘strike rules’ on social media platforms, directly addressing the outsized role of repeat spreaders.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78025168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Masha Krupenkin, Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker, David M. Rothschild
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, as we confronted questions about social distancing, masking wearing, and vaccines, public safety experts warned that the consequences of a misinformed population would be particularly dire due to the serious nature of the threat and necessity of severe collective action to keep the population safe. Thus, the media and the political elites (e.g., President of the United States) who possess the power to set the information agenda around COVID-19 bear a huge responsibility for the general welfare. Through automated text analysis of complete transcripts of national cable, network, and local news, we explore their narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and we characterize the differences in which topics were covered and how they were covered by various media sources. Our analysis reveals polarized narratives around blame, racial and economic disparities, and scientific conclusions about COVID-19. Among the various agenda-setting mechanisms available to the president is daily press conferences, which provide a unique opportunity to leverage public exposure, accelerated by the state of crisis. We found both resonance and contrast between the narratives of media and President press conferences. However, as online search data revealed, public information-seeking behavior resemble media coverage more than the President's messages.
{"title":"If a Tree Falls in the Forest: Presidential Press Conferences and Early Media Narratives about the COVID-19 Crisis","authors":"Masha Krupenkin, Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker, David M. Rothschild","doi":"10.51685/jqd.2022.011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.011","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, as we confronted questions about social distancing, masking wearing, and vaccines, public safety experts warned that the consequences of a misinformed population would be particularly dire due to the serious nature of the threat and necessity of severe collective action to keep the population safe. Thus, the media and the political elites (e.g., President of the United States) who possess the power to set the information agenda around COVID-19 bear a huge responsibility for the general welfare. Through automated text analysis of complete transcripts of national cable, network, and local news, we explore their narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and we characterize the differences in which topics were covered and how they were covered by various media sources. Our analysis reveals polarized narratives around blame, racial and economic disparities, and scientific conclusions about COVID-19. Among the various agenda-setting mechanisms available to the president is daily press conferences, which provide a unique opportunity to leverage public exposure, accelerated by the state of crisis. We found both resonance and contrast between the narratives of media and President press conferences. However, as online search data revealed, public information-seeking behavior resemble media coverage more than the President's messages.","PeriodicalId":93587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of quantitative description: digital media","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75618797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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