Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look

The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, explain how social media can lead to selective exposure and can be used as a disguise for those in power to disseminate biased information. To investigate this debate empirically, we evaluate Twitter as a public sphere using four metrics: equality, diversity, reciprocity and quality. Using these measurements, we analyze the communication patterns between individuals of different hierarchical levels and ideologies. We do this within the context of three diverse conflicts: Israel-Palestine, US Democrats-Republicans, and FC Barcelona-Real Madrid. In all cases, we collect data around a central pair of Twitter accounts representing the two main parties. Our results show in a quantitative manner that Twitter is not an ideal public sphere for democratic conversations and that hierarchical effects are part of the reason why it is not.Comment: To appear in the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2014), Barcelon

Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment

In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-oriented themes on refugee issues in social media, as well as illuminates the distinct role of social media platforms in shaping debates through user practices of hyperlink sharing and networked framing. Together these findings suggest that the hybrid media environment provides a possible arena for polarization of the refugee debate that could also be used for political ends.In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-oriented themes on refugee issues in social media, as well as illuminates the distinct role of social media platforms in shaping debates through user practices of hyperlink sharing and networked framing. Together these findings suggest that the hybrid media environment provides a possible arena for polarization of the refugee debate that could also be used for political ends.Peer reviewe

Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter

Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes

Drivers of News Sharing: How Context, Content, and User Features Shape Sharing Decisions on Facebook

What makes people share political news on Facebook? Prior studies have identified how different features predict audiences’ likelihood to share news on social media – the so-called shareworthiness of news. However, we still know very little about the relative contributions of these different features for predicting why people decide to share news. We extend the literature by using an experimental design that can compare the relative importance of several key features that contribute to shaping citizens’ sharing decisions: a conjoint experimental design. We use an identical layout to Facebook and a probability sample of Norwegian citizens. We find that particularly content characteristics are important, and that popularity cues and message congruence is conditional on some user characteristics such as age.publishedVersio

News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks

This article provides a review of scientific, peer-reviewed articles that examine the relationship between news sharing and social media in the period from 2004 to 2014. A total of 461 articles were obtained following a literature search in two databases (Communication & Mass Media Complete [CMMC] and ACM), out of which 109 were deemed relevant based on the study’s inclusion criteria. In order to identify general tendencies and to uncover nuanced findings, news sharing research was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Three central areas of research—news sharing users, content, and networks—were identified and systematically reviewed. In the central concluding section, the results of the review are used to provide a critical diagnosis of current research and suggestions on how to move forward in news sharing research

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.Comment: In Proc. CHI 2018 Papers program. Please cite: El Ali, A., Stratmann, T., Park, S., Sch\"oning, J., Heuten, W. & Boll, S. (2018). Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.317413

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.Comment: In Proc. CHI 2018 Papers program. Please cite: El Ali, A., Stratmann, T., Park, S., Sch\"oning, J., Heuten, W. & Boll, S. (2018). Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.317413

The role of social media and confirmation bias in victimization: Information consumption and opinion polarization

Technological advancement has contributed to the smooth and fast communication system where social media remain the top priority for human kind. Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias of human tendency to deducting information. Therefore, getting biased through unconfirmed media stories became a disease to the modern society. This article aims to explore and analyse the phenomenon of confirmation bias in cyber media, focusing on its impact on information consumption and polarization of opinions within online environments. Drawing upon existing literature and theoretical frameworks, namely Social Identity Theory, Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Selective Exposure Theory, and Agenda Setting Theory, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms and effects of confirmation bias in the digital age. The research design combines qualitative analysis of selected scholarly articles and quantitative analysis of user data from social media platforms. The analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of the impact of confirmation biases in cyber media by synthesizing insights from scholarly literature and analysing user data. It helps identify the mechanisms through which confirmation biases manifest in online environments, sheds light on the potential consequences of such biases, and informs strategies for addressing and mitigating their effects

The Paradox of Media Diversity: Values, Exposure, and Democratic Citizenship

Put forward by democratic theory, it is normatively expected that individuals value and seek news from diverse viewpoints in order to become good citizens. In this normative assumption, this dissertation identifies two paradoxes of media diversity: First, despite values widely ascribed to diversity-seeking, some individuals fail to seek diverse viewpoints (i.e., the diversity deficit). Second, individuals who consume diverse viewpoints do not appear to uniformly garner democratic benefits by becoming more politically informed, engaged, and capable of deliberation (i.e., there are mixed effects of diverse exposure on democratic citizenship). These paradoxes are explained with two sets of moderators: first, by applying the framework of Motivation, Opportunity and Ability (MOA), and second, by expanding on the theory of motivated reasoning. To accomplish this, two waves of survey data from an online panel of 1,328 Americans were collected during the 2016 presidential election campaign. On the first paradox, the results suggest that individuals with the right motivation, opportunity, and ability successfully translate their diversity values into diverse exposure. Specifically, people with strong diversity-seeking skills who also habitually consume news better-match their diversity values with diverse exposure. Political interest additionally helps individuals actualize their diversity values through diverse exposure on social media by following information sources. To explain the second paradox, this dissertation proposes and demonstrates three distinct motivations for cross-cutting exposure—defensive dismissal, defensive deliberation and balanced deliberation. For individuals with defensive motivations (who dismiss or counter-argue opposing views), diverse exposure suppresses political knowledge, but facilitates political participation and diverse news sharing on social media. In contrast to normative expectations, for individuals who are motivated to process opposing views in a balanced fashion, diverse exposure suppresses political knowledge, but increases political participation. These individuals with strong balanced deliberation motivations reap primarily deliberative benefits through diverse exposure by engaging in more cross-cutting discussion. Furthermore, sub-group analyses suggest that the majority of significant findings take place among partisans. Despite the popular negative narrative, partisans appear to function as good citizens in a few notable aspects. Compared to weak or non-partisans, partisans make better use of resources at hand to match their professed diversity values with diverse exposure, through which they in turn garner greater democratic benefits, including political participation and cross-cutting discussion. Overall, this dissertation argues that to better understand the muddied relationship between diverse exposure and democratic citizenship, it is important to consider psychological factors such as individual diversity values, different motivations for cross-cutting exposure, and strength of party affiliation. Finally, it makes practical suggestions regarding the ways in which the news industry, policymakers, and audiences can work together to build a news media landscape for an informed, engaged, and deliberative citizenry.PHDCommunicationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138625/1/dheekim_1.pd