sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448241245349 – Supplemental material for Hate-sharing: A case study of its prevalence and impact on Gab

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448241245349 for Hate-sharing: A case study of its prevalence and impact on Gab by Moira Weigel and Adina Gitomer in New Media & Society</p

You want a piece of me: Britney Spears as a case study on the prominence of hegemonic tales and subversive stories in online media

In this work, we seek to understand how hegemonic and subversive (counter-hegemonic) stories about gender and control are constructed across and between media platforms. To do so, we examine how American singer-songwriter Britney Spears is framed in the stories that tabloid journalists, Wikipedia editors, and Twitter users tell about her online. Using Spears’ portrayal as a case study, we hope to better understand how subversive stories come to prominence online, and how platform affordances and incentives can encourage or discourage their emergence. We draw upon previous work on the portrayal of women and mental illness in news and tabloid media, as well as work on narrative formation on Wikipedia. Using computational methods and critical readings of key articles, we find that Twitter, as a source of the #FreeBritney hashtag, continually supports counter-hegemonic narratives during periods of visibility, while both the tabloid publication TMZ and Wikipedia may lag in their adoption of the same

The speech we miss: How keyword-based data collection obscures youth participation in online political discourse

In this work, we leverage a panel of over 1.6 million Twitter users matched with public voter records to assess how a standard keyword-based approach to social media data collection performs in the context of participatory politics, and we critically examine the speech this method leaves behind. We find that keyword classifiers undercount young people’s participation in online political discourse, and that valuable political expression is lost in the process. We argue that a mainstream keyword approach to collecting social media data is not well-suited to the participatory politics associated with young people and may reinforce a false perception of youth political apathy as a result

STITCHING POLITICS AND IDENTITY ON TIKTOK

Though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (Dellatto, 2021). While much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of TikTok has become ever clearer. In the 2020 US election, Donald Trump’s plan to fill the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa was stymied by young activists who reserved tickets with no intention of attending, organized largely on TikTok (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020). In the years since, political discourse on TikTok has continued to emerge from everyday users and political campaigns alike (see Newman, 2022), even as TikTok itself has become an object of political contention: calls for banning the app in the United States–citing security concerns influenced by xenophobia, given the app’s Chinese ownership–began in the Trump presidency (Allyn, 2020) and have recently culminated in state- and federal-level bans on the app for government-owned devices in the U.S. (Berman, 2023). While some studies have navigated limited data access and the platform’s relative infancy to offer an examination of political TikTok (see Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Vijay & Gekker, 2021; Guinaudeau et al., 2022), there remains a significant need for more analysis and theorization of how TikTok can become both a site for political discourse and a feature caught up within political mobilization. This panel seeks to bring together emerging work that deals with political participation on TikTok, in order to share current wisdom and forge future research directions. The presented works specifically focus on the relationship between political participation on TikTok and political identity for three primary reasons. First, as a video-based and thus embodied platform (Raun, 2012), creator identity is more prominent and easily perceptible in the visual and auditory elements of TikTok videos than in the primarily text-based posts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, TikTok relies more heavily on its recommendation algorithm for content distribution than its competitors traditionally have (Kaye et al., 2022; Cotter et al., 2022; Zeng & Kaye, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2021), leading to the creation of “refracted publics” (Abidin, 2021) or Gemeinschaft-style communities (Kaye et al., 2022) around users’ common interests, which may include and/or be heavily informed by identity. Third, TikTok has long prioritized and found success with Generation Z and younger users more broadly (Zeng et al., 2021; Vogels et al., 2022; Stahl & Literat, 2022), which has made generational identity extremely salient on the app, while also implicating political identity, as young people tend to hold political beliefs more cognizant and accepting of diverse identities than older generations (Parker et al., 2019). The papers in this panel consider a wide range of identity characteristics of TikTok users and how these identities shape and are shaped by political discourse on TikTok. Paper 1 builds on TikTok’s targeting of Gen Z, considering the identities of age and generation through a content analysis of political remix on TikTok to uncover how younger users use TikTok for political activism as compared to their older counterparts, and finding evidence that TikTok is a powerful site of collective action. Also building from TikTok’s appeal to GenZ, Paper 2 presents a digital ethnographic analysis of the Trad-Wife phenomena on TikTok, offering that TikTok quietly (and thus insidiously) offers space for the cultivation of Christian Nationalist, ‘gentle fascisms’ within GenZ women, often without mention of ‘politics’ at all. Paper 3 offers a computational content analysis of political posts on TikTok with a focus on the interactions between identity and partisanship, and particularly the ways in which creators of marginalized identities on the right act as identity entrepreneurs, offering conservative critiques of their identity groups in ways which find popularity among conservative audiences of hegemonic identities. Finally, Paper 4 looks at differences in how TikTok users respond to male and female politicians’ TikTok videos using a combination of computational and qualitative methods, with exploratory analysis suggesting that male politicians receive more neutral and positive comments than female politicians. By focusing on identity and political discourse on TikTok, we recognize the wide range of political activity occurring on a platform often denigrated as frivolous, and foreground the importance of identity characteristics to the technological and social shaping of these dialogues

Pandemics, Protests, and Publics: Demographic Activity and Engagement on Twitter in 2020

As an integral component of public discourse, Twitter is among the main data sources for scholarship in this area. However, there is much that scholars do not know about the basic mechanisms of public discourse on Twitter, including the prevalence of various modes of communication, the types of posts users make, the engagement those posts receive, or how these things vary with user demographics and across different topical events. This paper broadens our understanding of these aspects of public discourse. We focus on the first nine months of 2020, studying that period as a whole and giving particular attention to two monumentally important topics of that time: the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging a panel of 1.6 million Twitter accounts matched to U.S. voting records, we examine the demographics, activity, and engagement of 800,000 American adults who collectively posted nearly 300 million tweets during this time span. We find notable variation in user activity and engagement, in terms of modality (e.g., retweets vs. replies), demographic subgroup, and topical context. We further find that while Twitter can best be understood as a collection of interconnected publics, neither topical nor demographic variation perfectly encapsulates the "Twitter public." Rather, Twitter publics are fluid, contextual communities which form around salient topics and are informed by demographic identities. Together, this paper presents a disaggregated, multifaceted description of the demographics, activity, and engagement of American Twitter users in 2020

The COVID States Project #39: Public attitudes towards the storming of the Capitol building

The 2020 election produced two distinct perceived realities for the United States public. The first perceived reality holds that the election was conducted fairly, and that Joe Biden won. Individuals who hold this vision of reality feel their votes were counted accurately, and that the events of January 6th were repugnant. This is also the version of reality for 60-70% of the US population. This reality is documented by court cases, our government officials (Republican and Democratic) in charge of administering the election, and the credible news media. The second vision of reality holds that the election was essentially corrupt—driven, in particular, by illegal mail-in ballots, noncitizen voting, and voting machine fraud. In this perceived reality, Biden is a usurper to the presidency. Further, the people who stormed the Capitol had a point, although the worst actions were taken by individuals affiliated with Antifa activists masquerading as Trump supporters. This is the expressed reality of former President Trump, certain Republican leaders, a subset of conservative media, and certain corners of the social media ecosystem. This is also the reality for 25-30% of the US population, and roughly half of Republicans. These two perceived realities are not created equal. The facts, as presented by the fact sorting institutions of the government and media, unambiguously support the first. However, perceptions—especially when they are shared by a sizable number of people and organized in a way that provides access to power—have consequences. The data below suggest that these two perceived realities will continue to define US politics, at least for the near future, because they are clustered around the two parties, and in each perceived reality, the other party is not just an opponent, but an enemy of democracy. In each case, the logical conclusion is that the assumption of power by the other party represents a potentially permanent surrendering of power. Below, we summarize public opinion regarding election integrity and the events of January 6th, and close by discussing the implications of these findings for American politics over the next 4 years

The COVID States Project #40: COVID-19 vaccine attitudes among healthcare workers

In this report, we examine the demographic correlates of vaccination, vaccine hesitancy, and vaccine resistance among the subset of 1,797 respondents in the COVID states survey who indicated that they are healthcare workers. We find that education, income, gender, race/ethnicity, and partisanship are strong predictors of vaccination rates recorded thus far, as well as of vaccine hesitancy and resistance

The COVID States Project #47: Update on COVID-19 vaccine attitudes among healthcare workers

This report is an update of our February report on attitudes and vaccination rates of healthcare workers. The essential patterns are similar, with the obvious exception being the increased rates of vaccination. We focus on vaccination, vaccine resistance, vaccine hesitancy, vaccine access, and vaccine refusal

The COVID States Project #41: Trajectory of health-related behaviors in New Jersey

New Jersey is similar to other states in the northeast, in that it had its initial spike in COVID-19 cases during March and April 2020, with a second wave that peaked in December 2020 and January 2021. This report presents an overview of key trends in the behavior of New Jersey residents since the first months of the pandemic, with respect to following health guidelines aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19

The COVID States Project #46: Executive approval update

As part of the COVID states project, we have been asking people in all 50 states about their approval of their governors and the President. Since our last report on executive approval, which examined trends through October, 2020, there have been radical shifts in the pandemic, with huge surges of cases and deaths, followed by a dramatic drop since January. Changes in executive approval during this time have been more subtle. See Figure 1 for approval trends overall, and Figure 2 for these trends separated by partisanship