Social Media

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):

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 …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Brian Weeks, who explores the ecology of incidental news exposure. The various elements of that ecology determine who is exposed to news content, and to what extent, and what impacts such exposure may generate.

In the ecological model of incidental exposure, a number of individual and environmental factors combine. Such factors may be related, respectively, to contextual states or more fundamental traits of the individual or their environment. They include individual traits like cognitive ability or socioeconomic status, but also traits like cognitive load; self-concept traits like partisan identity or states …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Kjerstin Thorson, who begins by noting that incidental exposure is not simply random, but unevenly distributed across the online userbase. The idea of attraction may be useful here: what is it that attracts specific news content into a social media stream; who attracts incidental exposure? What practices produce attraction, or repel news content?

Who has these happy accidents of incidental exposure, then? In the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, better levels of education mean that users are more likely to be incidentally exposed. The factors that seem to matter …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Richard Fletcher, who highlights the shift in news users’ main source of news – away from conventional sources and towards online, digital, app-based, and social media channels. This has been linked by some with a rise in echo chambers and filter bubbles, but the incidental news exposure that such platforms also engender means that it has been very difficult to find any real evidence for filter bubbles beyond isolated extreme cases.

One important aspect in all of this is automated incidental news exposure: do incidentally exposed news users actively curate their …

The next ICA 2018 session is on incidental news exposure, and starts with a paper presented by Pablo Boczkowski. ‘Incidental’ here means that people encounter the news without actively seeking to do so. Such work on this has been predominantly quantitative, but there is some more qualitative work on this topic emerging as well. Most of this work has been focussing on single countries in the developed world, too.

Incidental consumption of news is far from new, but is becoming more important in digital and social media contexts, and with the rise in news consumption via mobile devices. Some groups …

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump …

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

That relationship is also based on certain normative aspects – seeing journalists as watchdogs on behalf of citizens, for instance. But such norms are themselves founded in mutually accepted values, and the societal consensus that governs those values may be breaking down. Indeed, we may no longer be able to …

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …