32,657 research outputs found
Reinforcing attitudes in a gatewatching news era: individual-level antecedents to sharing fact-checks on social media
Despite the prevalence of fact-checking, little is known about who posts fact-checks online. Based upon a content analysis of Facebook and Twitter digital trace data and a linked online survey (N = 783), this study reveals that sharing fact-checks in political conversations on social media is linked to age, ideology, and political behaviors. Moreover, an individual’s need for orientation (NFO) is an even stronger predictor of sharing a fact-check than ideological intensity or relevance, alone, and also influences the type of fact-check format (with or without a rating scale) that is shared. Finally, participants generally shared fact-checks to reinforce their existing attitudes. Consequently, concerns over the effects of fact-checking should move beyond a limited-effects approach (e.g., changing attitudes) to also include reinforcing accurate beliefs.Accepted manuscrip
Predicting User-Interactions on Reddit
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced
content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make
decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User
interactions such as likes, votes, clicks, and views are assumed to be a proxy
of a content's quality, popularity, or news-worthiness. In this paper we ask:
how predictable are the interactions of a user on social media? To answer this
question we recorded the clicking, browsing, and voting behavior of 186 Reddit
users over a year. We present interesting descriptive statistics about their
combined 339,270 interactions, and we find that relatively simple models are
able to predict users' individual browse- or vote-interactions with reasonable
accuracy.Comment: Presented at ASONAM 201
Discussion quality diffuses in the digital public square
Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have
important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings.
However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers
in digital public squares, despite important conversations happening in such
spaces. We present the results of a study on large public Facebook pages where
we randomly used two different methods--most recent and social feedback--to
order comments on posts. We find that the social feedback condition results in
higher quality viewed comments and response comments. After measuring the
average quality of comments written by users before the study, we find that
social feedback has a positive effect on response quality for both low and high
quality commenters. We draw on a theoretical framework of social norms to
explain this empirical result. In order to examine the influence mechanism
further, we measure the similarity between comments viewed and written during
the study, finding that similarity increases for the highest quality
contributors under the social feedback condition. This suggests that, in
addition to norms, some individuals may respond with increased relevance to
high-quality comments.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
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