The Impact of Journalists’ Amplification of Politicians’ Tweets

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

Jan’s study is attempting to address this by observing developments in the Netherlands, combining data from Twitter and the mainstream media about the candidates’ own activities, responses to them, and coverage of their activities in the media with the eventual election results in the recent Dutch election.

Newspaper coverage turned out to have a significant influence on message popularity. Tweet content also affected media coverage, and generated coverage especially if tweet content was critical or aligned with an existing media agenda. Messages on topics for which the sender had a high level of competence also resulted on stronger engagement. Personal popularity on Twitter also correlated strongly with the eventual election results.

This means that politicians still need amplification by journalists to make their tweets work – and therefore journalists are accountable for the impact of tweets by politicians. By extension, their amplification of particularly aggressive or critical tweets might violate journalistic standards, lowering the quality of overall public debate. Yet journalists’ coverage of tweets by more marginal politicians also counterbalances the presidential-style centralisation of political debate around a handful of political leaders.