Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: the case of Donald Trump

Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We situate our study in the context of current discussions of audience formation, attention flow, and hybridity in the United States’ political media system. From this we derive propositions concerning how attentive publics aggregate around a particular object, in this case Trump himself, which we test using time series modeling. We also present an exploration of the possible role of automated accounts in these processes. Our results reiterate the media hybridity described by others, while emphasizing the importance of news media coverage in building social media attentive publics.Accepted manuscrip

The Impact of Crowds on News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study

Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity. In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity and how those features may change on reddit.com, a social platform used commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be more popular than posts with the original article title.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public Opinion at ICWSM 201

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

When the Personal Becomes the Political: Examining Political Engagement on Social Media.

Numerous scholars have examined how political and informational uses of social media contribute to on- and offline political participation, but little is known about how non-political social media practices and social media network contexts shape political behaviors on such sites in everyday social media use. Drawing on a theoretical framework that views “the political” as an extended terrain of “the personal,” this dissertation examines the relationships between passive (i.e., consuming content) and active (i.e., producing content) forms of non-political and political social media use, and investigates the extent to which these associations are stratified by political interest, education, and age, using two separate adult samples of Facebook and Twitter users. With the same focus on everyday social media use, a survey experiment is conducted to investigate the impact of network prime—when users are primed with Facebook network size, diversity (i.e., the degree to which network members are evenly divided across classifications of social groups), and perceived political similarity to groups of connections on Facebook—on users’ willingness to react to political mobilization messages in various ways. The findings presented in this dissertation show that forms of non-political social media use differentially associate with political behaviors on the sites, and that these relationships are not always contingent on political interests, education, and age. In addition to social media practices, social media network contexts also shape political behaviors, such that network prime suppresses users’ willingness to actively engage with certain political mobilization requests. These results broadly support the conceptualization of “the political” as deeply embedded in “the personal,” raise both concerns and hopes for the future of political inequality, and highlight the importance of social contexts in shaping political behaviors on social media sites. Future research should continue to explore how different non-political social media practices and contexts influence behavioral and attitudinal political outcomes on and beyond social media sites.PhDCommunication StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111620/1/rpyu_1.pd