Social Media

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Darian Harff, whose interest is in the political topics covered by social media influencers in Germany and Flanders. Social media influencers run popular social media accounts and have become well-known because of their content specialties, but some occasionally also address political topics. This can be consequential in affecting public opinion especially amongst younger audiences, but is also problematic because they often have no formal political expertise. Such influencers can therefore emerge as opinion leaders who curate political information.

What topics do such influencers cover, then? Are these issues of collective …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

But the social media ecosystem does not replicate the web ecosystem, and some news outlets are making better use of those ecosystems to attract audiences than others. Users’ choices of platforms, and news outlets’ choices in engaging with platforms, both affect the formation of platform used …

The next session of the ICA 2024 conference that I’m in starts with Christian Pipal, whose interest is in political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. He begins by noting the use of TikTok by the Austrian presidential candidate (and subsequently president) in Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, who both announced his candidacy there and posted the requisite dancing videos.

TikTok may be especially attractive to political candidates because of its younger audience profile, but is this dancing or talking politics? Candidates have explored some very different communicative styles that seem to work for them on this platform: comedic, documentary …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ori Tenenboim, whose interest is in why news users limit their public expression online. This might be driven by perceptions of the visibility of their news engagement, and of the consequences that such visibility may have.

News engagement plays a crucial role in democratic life, and plays a role in what people see and engage with; if users self-censor such engagement then this also affects what other people see in their digital media spaces. Non-engagement may also relate to relationship management, and be affected by users’ privacy calculus about their …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Nicolas Mattis, whose interest is in news diversification. This builds on notions of democratically (rather than merely economically) motivated news recommender design, the purported links between news diversity and democratically desirable effects, and emerging experiments with various news diversification metrics.

Any kind of digital news environment can be thought of as a choice architecture: they filter, rank, and present news stories to their user. News diversification facilitates engagement with diverse news, and seeks to facilitate normatively desirable outcomes; this involves the adjustment of such choice architectures. Democratic theory can provide …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Iris Baas, whose interest is in the self-identity of Dutch Twitter users who share the news. Twitter is (even now, following its enshittification) a key platform especially for news consumption in the Netherlands, and who is sharing news on the platform is therefore centrally important. Are there district groups of such users, then – and what news do they share?

This project worked with the Twitter bios of such news-sharing users to determine patterns in their identities; it drew on some 400,000 tweets from 2021 (that were still online, from …

The next speaker at the ICA 2024 conference is Jennifer Ihm, who begins by outlining key interests in news-sharing research: such content has been studied for its information value as well as its viral dissemination. But how do social media users assess the value and relevance of the news being shared? There might be two types of self-presentational value in news-sharing: based on self-constructive motivations, or based on audience-pleasing motivations (relational, informational, or entertainment aspects may all contribute here).

Issue relevance in news articles may be at the personal, audience, or societal level, then: personal relevance is likely to be …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

This paper approaches these practices through niche theory, which encourages scholars to explore media resource utilisation by identifying the breadth of the niches that such media address, and the overlap between the niches addressed by …

The final paper in this ICA 2024 conference session is by Talia Stroud, who begins by noting that cross-cutting exposure is seen as normatively good – but exposure to cross-cutting views has also been found to potentially increase polarisation. Where such cross-cutting exposure takes place matters, then; cross-cutting exposure in inherently non-political spaces might be more productive here than it is in explicitly political spaces.

This links to intergroup contact theory (and, I assume, Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the third place), but in deeply bipolar nations such as the United States even the establishment of such non-political spaces might …

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Biying Wu-Ouyang, presenting a systematic review of research on cross-cutting exposure. Social media users are constantly exposed to cross-cutting views, and this can increase information exposure and thus depolarise opinions, but also increase polarisation by confronting them with out-group perspectives; there may also be no effect whatsoever.

What exactly happens here depends on a range of factors – such as sources, modality, or intentions of the cross-cutting exposure. Other attributes (measurement, design and sampling strategies, and local contexts) may also affect the results of individual studies.

The present study is reviewing …