Facebook

The next paper in this Social Media and Society 2018 session is by Michael Bossetta, Chris Zimmermann, and Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, whose interest is in patterns in post-Brexit Facebook discussions. In particular, what is the role of emotions in these discussions, and what are their implications? The project gathered data using the Vox Populi data collection, enhanced with other data.

The analysis employed SentiStrength and other sentiment detection algorithms to assess the sentiment, emotionality, arousal, core emotions, and fine-grained feelings in Facebook posts from three major Facebook pages related to the Brexit referendum; most of the discussion took place here …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is Dam Hee Kim, whose focus is on what effects exposure to diverse political viewpoints has on partisan views. Such exposure has always been seen as important for a healthy democracy, but this poses two major challenges: audiences do not necessarily actively seek out diverse viewpoints, and such diverse exposure does not necessarily bring about the democratic benefits that theory would expect.

First, audiences tend to expose themselves to news that is in line with their established personal views. Today, they might see a variety of news also via Facebook and other …

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 is Moran Yarchi, whose interest is also in the uses of social media in election campaigns. But few recent studies have specifically examined the uses of social media by female politicians: much of the work on the role of women in politics still focusses on other matters, including mainstream media representation.

The present study focusses on Israel, where women make up only 27% of the Members of the Knesset. Media coverage continues to focus on male politicians, and the focus of such coverage is also more on personal matters, while for women considerably …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

We must therefore distinguish between the personalisation, privatisation, and emotionalisation of politicians’ social media profiles; to what extent are such forms of self-personalisation present, and to what extent do they engage the audience? The present study examined this for the Facebook of the leading party candidates in Germany.

Generic personalisation retains a professional …

The second ICA 2018 session this morning is the one I have a paper in as well – we’re discussing the (scant) empirical evidence for echo chambers and filter bubbles. We start, though, with a paper by Anja Bechmann that is working with a broad sample of newsfeed data from Danish Facebook users.

The newsfeed potentially acts as a shared public news platform where people meet around shared news content. ‘News’ here might mean many things – journalistic, political news in a narrow sense, but also user-oriented relation news and the user updates of many kinds that newsfeed algorithms treat …