Social media: a guide for researchers

This guide has been produced by the International Centre for Guidance Studies, and aims to provide the information needed to make an informed decision about using social media and select from the vast range of tools that are available. One of the most important things that researchers do is to find, use and disseminate information, and social media offers a range of tools which can facilitate this. The guide discusses the use of social media for research and academic purposes and will not be examining the many other uses that social media is put to across society. Social media can change the way in which you undertake research, and can also open up new forms of communication and dissemination. It has the power to enable researchers to engage in a wide range of dissemination in a highly efficient way.Research Information Networ

Live Blogging and Social Media Curation: Challenges and Opportunities for Journalism

Blogging and social media’s contribution to a realignment of the relationship between journalists and their audiences is discussed by Einar Thorsen in Live Blogging and Social Media Curation. Journalists are facing challenges to preserve traditional standards, such as verification of information and sources, whilst also capitalising on the opportunities afforded by the immediacy, transparency and interactive nature of online communication. Thorsen analyses these issues through two case studies: one focuses on ‘live’ blogging and elections, and a second looks at the role of social media in the Arab Spring. He demonstrates how journalists face new challenges in relation to social media curation, whilst the emergent forms and practices also present a wealth of opportunities

Communicating for change: media and agency in the networked public sphere

This paper is aimed at anyone who is interested in the role of media as an influence on power and policy. It especially about the role of news journalism, NGOs and other activists who use communication for change. It looks at the context for those actors and their actions. It asks how much the Internet and social networks are changing advocacy. It takes an ethical and political rather than technological or theoretical approach. It ask whether the ‘public sphere’ needs to be redefined. If that is the case, I argue, then we need to think again about journalism, advocacy communications and the relationship between mediation and social, political or economic change. I would identify three overlapping, interrelated media dynamics that might add up to the need for a new notion of the public sphere: the disruption of communication power; the rise of networked journalism; the dual forces for online socialisation and corporatisation. This is not only a theoretical concern. From these dynamics flow all the other arguments about what kind of media we want or need, and what effect it will have on our ability to communicate particular kinds of issues or information. Unless we understand the strategic context of these changes we will continue to make the kind of tactical blunders that Kony2012, for example, represents. This is not just an academic question, it is an ethical, political and practical set of problems

Who’s Following Twitter? Coverage of the Microblogging Phenomenon by U.S. Cable News Networks

Through data captured in a digital content analysis (DCA) lab, we examine coverage of Twitter across three 24-hour U.S. cable news channels: CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. This investigation tracked Twitter coverage from its initial stage, followed by its rise to a massively used tool and its subsequent diffusion into society, evident through its plateauing coverage. News stories covering Twitter, as it penetrated into society, were more likely to use benefit/gain frames when discussing the technology, highlighting its positive social, communicative, political, and participatory impact. Benefit frames were also likely to associate Twitter with journalism. Patterns emerging through the indicator graphs plotted by the DCA lab showed that the most intense coverage occurred during crisis situations, as Twitter coverage reached saturation, followed by increased personal daily usage of Twitter

clicktatorship and democrazy: Social media and political campaigning

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise

Recruiting from the network: discovering Twitter users who can help combat Zika epidemics

Tropical diseases like \textit{Chikungunya} and \textit{Zika} have come to prominence in recent years as the cause of serious, long-lasting, population-wide health problems. In large countries like Brasil, traditional disease prevention programs led by health authorities have not been particularly effective. We explore the hypothesis that monitoring and analysis of social media content streams may effectively complement such efforts. Specifically, we aim to identify selected members of the public who are likely to be sensitive to virus combat initiatives that are organised in local communities. Focusing on Twitter and on the topic of Zika, our approach involves (i) training a classifier to select topic-relevant tweets from the Twitter feed, and (ii) discovering the top users who are actively posting relevant content about the topic. We may then recommend these users as the prime candidates for direct engagement within their community. In this short paper we describe our analytical approach and prototype architecture, discuss the challenges of dealing with noisy and sparse signal, and present encouraging preliminary results

Mapping networks of influence: tracking Twitter conversations through time and space

The increasing use of social media around global news events, such as the London Olympics in 2012, raises questions for international broadcasters about how to engage with users via social media in order to best achieve their individual missions. Twitter is a highly diverse social network whose conversations are multi-directional involving individual users, political and cultural actors, athletes and a range of media professionals. In so doing, users form networks of influence via their interactions affecting the ways that information is shared about specific global events. This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organisations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events. We build an analysis around a set of tweets collected during the 2012 London Olympics. To understand how different users influence the conversations across Twitter, we compare three types of accounts: those belonging to a number of well-known athletes, those belonging to some well-known commentators employed by the BBC, and a number of corporate accounts belonging to the BBC World Service and the official London Twitter account. We look at the data from two perspectives. First, to understand the structure of the social groupings formed among Twitter users, we use a network analysis to model social groupings in the Twittersphere across time and space. Second, to assess the influence of individual tweets, we investigate the ageing factor of tweets, which measures how long users continue to interact with a particular tweet after it is originally posted. We consider what the profile of particular tweets from corporate and athletes’ accounts can tell us about how networks of influence are forged and maintained. We use these analyses to answer the questions: How do different types of accounts help shape the social networks? and, What determines the level and type of influence of a particular account

Audience Gatekeeping in the Twitter Service: An Investigation of Tweets about the 2009 Gaza Conflict

Twitter is a social news service in which information is selected and distributed by individual members of the tweet audience. While communication literature has studied traditional news media and the propagation of information, to our knowledge there have been no studies of the new social media and their impacts on the propagation of news during extreme event situations. This exploration attempts to build an understanding of how preexisting hyperlink structures on the Web and different types of information channels affect Twitter audiences’ information selection. The study analyzes the concentration of user-selected information sources in Twitter about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. There are three findings. First, a statistical test of a power-law structure revealed that, while a wide range of information was selected and redistributed by Twitter users, the aggregation of these selections over-represented a small number of prominent websites. Second, binomial regression analyses showed that Twitter user selections were not constituted randomly but were affected by the number of hyperlinks received and the types of information channels. Third, temporal analyses revealed that sources via social media channels were more prominently selected especially in the later stages of the news information lifespan