Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.
The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.
This missing European public sphere has also been blamed as one driver of the U.K.’s recent Brexit vote: without a European public sphere there are few fora available to counteract the negative discussion about the European Union that may be taking place in national …
The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.
In ‘fake news’, there is a relation between the content, its dissemination, and the users involved in that dissemination. ‘Fake news’ itself can also be distinguished into mis-, dis- …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Pablo Jost, who begins by discussing the limitations of surveys (expensive, reactive, increasingly unable to reach representative panels of participants) and raises the question of whether digital trace data may be able to be used as an alternative. Twitter might be a poor substitute, as it remains an elite medium in many countries; Facebook use, however, is far more widespread, and could therefore be seen as considerably less inherently biased.
The present project sampled news media posts on Facebook in the lead-up to the 2017 German federal election, and in these …
The next speaker at ECREA 2018 is Deniz Neriman Duru, who begins by highlighting the role of the news media as presenting moral guidelines for their audiences, here especially in the context of the edit framing of the European refugee crisis. This can be studied usefully by examining the linkages between mainstream media framing in and social media reactions to news media articles.
The project collected data on article comments on Facebook in September 2015, at the peak of the refugee crisis, in the pages of Danish news outlets, examining the content of articles and of the threads attached to …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.
Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …
