Opinion Formation in Social Media: The Influence of Online News Dissemination on Facebook Posts

ABSTRACT

This study aims to explore the influence of online news dissemination on public opinion in social media and examine what factors determine the influence. Online news stories (N=51) from 37 sources and Facebook posts (N=317) on the construction of Africa’s first modern international railway line, the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway line, were retrieved between June and November 2017 for the period April 11, 2012 to November 30, 2017. Comparative content analysis of online news and Facebook posts revealed that there was positive correlation between frame repetition by news media and prevalence of the frame in social media opinion. The results showed that there were statistically significant associations in the presence of positive as well as negative frame tones between news articles and Facebook posts. However, the relationship in the use of neutral frame tone between news and opinion was not significant. Regarding composition, short news stories exert more influence on social media opinion than longer news articles, as indicated by negative correlation between news article length and its influence on opinion. Overall, the results suggest that online news dissemination strongly influences opinion formation in social media.     

The Friendly Media Phenomenon: A Cross-National Analysis of Cross-Cutting Exposure

We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country's media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country's population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives.     

The role of memes in the construction of Facebook personae

Abstract

This research is based on the assumption that social media sites – such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – have changed the way in which memes (culturally transmitted ideas) are transmitted or spread. It is argued that social media have provided the most fertile environment for the replication of memes to date. The social networking site Facebook is the main social media example used throughout the research. The way in which Facebook is represented in film, as well as the ways in which the offline lives of the characters are affected by their social media profiles, specifically as depicted in the film Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010) are analysed. Lastly, it is argued that one can construct an entirely new persona, or merely experiment with different aspects of who you are, on social media sites. This online persona can be influenced by the memes one chooses to spread online. Naturally, all memes carry connotations, values and judgements. These memes collate with one's profile and, thus, the connotations attached to the memes one shares are then associated with one's online persona/profile. It is found that although a social networking user tries to portray him/herself in an idealised manner, these memetic connotations give a true impression of his/her offline persona. As a result, there is not much difference between the user's online and offline personae.     

The Mass Media as Sentinel: Why Bad News About Issues is Good News for Participation

This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.     

Bridging Gaps in Cross-Cutting Media Exposure: The Role of Public Service Broadcasting

Previous studies show that individual political interest is an antecedent of news media exposure, particularly of exposure to differing views. Nevertheless, little is known about this effect from a comparative perspective: How do media institutions affect the relationship between political interest and exposure to cross-cutting viewpoints? One institutional feature that varies between countries is the ownership of broadcast media. This study investigates the extent to which the relative dominance of public service broadcasting alters the relationship between political interest and non-like-minded, or cross-cutting, news media exposure across 27 European Union countries. The analyses employ survey data from 27,079 individuals and media content from 48,983 news stories. The results confirm that the extent to which political interest contributes to cross-cutting exposure is contingent on the strength of public service broadcasting. The stronger the broadcaster, the smaller the gaps between the most and least politically engaged individuals.     

How Political Elites Process Information From the News: The Cognitive Mechanisms Behind Behavioral Political Agenda-Setting Effects

Political agenda-setting studies have shown that political agendas are influenced by the media agenda. Researchers in the field of media and politics are now focusing on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. This article contributes to the literature by focusing not on aggregate, behavioral political attention for issues (e.g., parliamentary questions or legislation), but on Members of Parliament’s (MP) individual, cognitive attention for specific news stories. Drawing upon a survey of Belgian MPs administered shortly after exposure to news stories, the study shows that MPs are highly selective in exploiting media cues. They pay more attention to both prominent and useful news stories, but a story’s usefulness is more important for cognitive processes that are closely linked to MPs’ real behavior in parliament. In other words, aggregate political agenda-setting effects are a consequence of the way in which individual MPs process media information that matches their task-related needs.     

Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs: How Russians Watch the News

Citizens in democracies are expected to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners' agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in 16 focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, showed that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes.     

Social Media Influence on Diplomatic Negotiation: Shifting the Shape of the Table

Social media is changing not only the atmosphere in which international negotiations take place; it is also changing the very substance of the deals. Because of the pace and proliferation of social media, negotiators must read “weak signals” early on—and anticipate a quickly organized, highly motivated opposition. However, diplomatic negotiators still lack the tools to engage in this sort of anticipatory strategy design. This article examines two recent cases, one involving the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the other involving a German Constitutional Court’s ruling on the European Central Bank’s Public Debt Purchasing Program, in which social media had a highly disruptive, unanticipated impact on international negotiations—to the point of forcing negotiators’ hands—and suggests institutional remedies to better anticipate the catalytic impact of advancing technology on diplomatic interactions.     

The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.     

Postcards and Propaganda: Cartographic Postcards as Soft News Images of the Russo-Japanese War

Postcards are an important resource that has been largely overlooked in mainstream research on historical events, political attitudes, perceptions, propaganda, and communication. Accordingly, this article expands the relevance of the postcard from social artifact to historical document embodying social and political messages. In particular, the article examines the images and representations used in cartographic postcards during and after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Not only is this relevant to the study of political propaganda, but also for the study of historic media, popular consumption of political messaging, and as an additional tool with which to study the history of international politics and communication. The political history leading up to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War is briefly covered. Images of cartographic postcards are examined in context of the conflict, with the goal of gaining a greater appreciation for postcards as a form of early “soft news” visual mass media. As such, this is a means by which imperial attitudes and public opinion were shaped. Recommendations are made to broaden the use of postcards as primary documents, especially as these cards are enjoying an online renaissance (e.g., collecting, displaying, discussing). They are valuable in augmenting a variety of research agendas and are fruitful for the study of early modern mass media, social history, public discourse, and political messaging with regard to soft news and public opinion.     

Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft,Facebook, Twitter,and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.     

Differential Online Exposure to Extremist Content and Political Violence: Testing the Relative Strength of Social Learning and Competing Perspectives

The present study applies Social Learning (Differential Association) Theory to the explanation of political violence, focusing on exposure to extremist content through new social media (NSM) and controlling for key variables derived from rival theories. Data are gathered using (a) a paper-and-pencil study among high school students, and (b) a web survey targeting youths between 16 and 24 years old. A total of 6020 respondents form the dataset. Binary logistic regression is used to analyze the data. Results show that even when controlling for background variables, strain variables, personality characteristics, moral values, and peer influences, the statistical association between measures of extremism through NSM (ENSM) and self-reported political violence remains significant and fairly constant. The most persistent effects are found for those measures where individuals actively seek out extremist content on the Internet, as opposed to passive and accidental encounters using NSM. Furthermore, offline differential associations with racist and delinquent peers are also strongly and directly related to self-reported political violence, as are some mechanisms from rival perspectives. This indicates that political violence can only partially be explained by social learning and suggests that the impact of ENSM is mediated by real-world associations and that the offline world has to be taken into account.     

Presidential Influence of the News Media: The Case of the Press Conference

Can presidents influence news coverage through their press conferences? Scant research has explored this question leaving two possible answers. On the one hand, presidential news management efforts, combined with norms of journalistic professionalism and the cost of producing news, suggest that the nightly news will cover presidential press conferences. On the other hand, the costs of delivering press conferences espoused by some scholars insinuate that press conferences will have little impact on news coverage. To determine whether the press conference influences news coverage, I use plagiarism detection software to assess the propensity of television news to incorporate the president's rhetoric into stories that cover the president's press conferences. I find that news reports on the press conference rely heavily on the president's words, indicating that it is an important event for presidential influence of the news media and perhaps eventually the public.     

The role of leisure activities and social attitudes in the mass media consumption of a sample of South African adults: A psychographic approach

Abstract

This study, the second in a two-article series, explores the interplay between attitudes, behaviour and media consumption in a sample of South African adults. Participants aged 16 years and older were drawn from a subsample of data collected during the 2007A South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) All Media and Products Survey (AMPS®). Utilising statistical comparison of psychographic typologies, this study confirmed the existence of significant, albeit weak, relationships between mass media consumption, social attitudes and leisure interests/activities in this sample. Analyses of demographic variables revealed further significant relationships between mass media consumption and home language, work status, the SAARF Lifestages and the SAARF Universal Living Standards Measure (SU-LSM®). The findings are discussed in relation to available empirical literature and the need for advancement of the media psychology sub-discipline in South Africa.     

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.