Social Media

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits, and in the media coverage. These each drew on a massive amount of mobile photos; on the real-time publishing of such content in social media; and on crowdsourcing of activities through social media.

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Iñaki Garcia-Blanco, whose focus is on discussing the news on social media, and specifically on Facebook. This is important given the perceived crisis of democracy, which requires greater levels of deliberation. Social media bring together access to the news and facilities for discussing it, and Facebook is increasingly important in this.

The research examined the news stories published by leading UK news sources on their official Facebook pages over the course of a single working week (some 1650 articles in total). Human interest and lifestyle stories were strongest in numbers, while commenting on international politics was disproportionately strong.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2014 panel is Cédric Courtois, whose interest is in individual action and collective efficacy on Facebook. Within Facebook, there are plenty of constraints, but we are nonetheless navigating these constraints to engage in connective action. What motivates people to do so, and what is their perception of the efficacy of such activities?

Possible explanations for engagement through liking, commenting, and content creation could be genuine involvement in an issue, and a perception that such involvement will effect change. Self-presentation as someone interested in specific issues may also play a role.

The next panel on this marathon day at ECREA 2014 starts with Sascha Hölig, whose interest is in patterns of online political engagement in Europe. Democracy depends on structures that enable finding information, exchanging opinions, and negotiating decisions; the news is one key source of such information.

The Reuters Digital News Survey studies news consumption patterns across 10 European nations, drawing on surveys with some 19,000 users. There is a high interest in news, and frequent access to news, across Europe; more than 80% of users access the news at least once a day, especially from television.

The next speaker in is ECREA 2014 session is Arjen van Dalen, whose interest is in the impact of algorithms on public opinion formation at the micro (individual), meso (discussion) and macro (social networks) level; his focus here is on the latter.

Algorithms transform such public opinion formation: some 30% of users read news on social media, and that number is likely to increase. The business strategies of news media are increasingly adjusted to this trend, and the number of social media engagements with news (likes, shares, etc.) are increasingly being used by journalists as an indicator of public opinion, too.

The final paper in this ECREA 2014 session is by Julie Uldam, whose focus is on the silencing of critical voices in the online public sphere; this is an argument for an agonistic perspective of the public sphere. Antagonism tends to be anticipated and silenced by corporations monitoring social media, often using user profiling strategies.

Her example here is the UK climate justice movement, which reacted to BP's unlikely role as a 'sustainability partner' in the 2012 London Olympics; one of its protests was the Reclaim Shakespeare Company, which riffed off BP's sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company during the Olympics festivities, invading the stage before the official performance and circulating the footage via social media. Leaked emails from BP show the company's tracking of protestors and anticipation of further actions.

Next up at ECREA 2014 is Sanja Kapidzic, whose interest is in how the NSA scandal was communicated in Germany via Twitter. The public sphere is seen here as having a triadic structure, between journalists, official spokespeople, and citizens. Traditionally, this has been dominated by the mass media, but shifts toward online communication have changed this balance; direct bidirectional communication is now possible between all three points of the triad.

This is especially notable in social media environments such as Twitter; however, new hierarchies and elites may also emerge here. What are the new structures of influence in this context, then?

Finally, Kristin van Damme is back with another ECREA 2014 paper, on the role of trust in news selection through social media. Social media platforms now play a role as news aggregators where users as well as the platforms are sharing the news; Kristin surveyed Flemish news users on their use of news and social media to explore these issues.

Up next at ECREA 2014 is Tim Groot Komelink, who shifts our focus to the quantification of news usage practices through the news organisations' emerging online readership monitoring practices. This builds on services such a Google Analytics, and user monitoring of this kind has also led to the development of news content genres such as clickbait, and of 'news' operators specialising in such content.

The final session at ECREA 2014 today starts with Irene Costera Meijer, whose interest is in the changing patterns of news consumption – from consumption in fixed places and at fixed times through the customisation of news and the active contribution to the news to the foregrounding of the social experience of news. Research into these changes has largely been based on survey or diary research, or on Web metrics.

How may be able to further examine such changes over a longer period of time, though? The project engaged in a ten-year programme of multi-mode investigations that focussed on exploring actual news use practices rather than on encouraging respondents to offer their opinions only.