5,287 research outputs found
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Outcompeting Traditional Peers? Scholarly Social Networks and Academic Output
In this paper we evaluate the interplay between scholarly social networking and academic output. To this end, we tested the hypotheses that the activity of users on scholarly social networks is associated with academic output, and that the intra-or interdisciplinary background of scholars affects academic output and online activity. The quantitative data used for this study was collected from the publicly-accessible scholarly social network HASTAC and complemented with a qualitative survey collected from 123 students and recent alumni of the HASTAC Scholars Program. After processing the different sources of data, we rejected the hypotheses that academic output and activity on scholarly social networks are affected by scholar's intra-or interdisciplinary backgrounds, but our results partially support the hypothesis that activity in scholarly networks is associated with academic output. Finally, we discuss the generalizability of our findings and argue that online activity and academic output are both likely driven by networked Scholars committed to academic research
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Digital Journalism and Tabloid Journalism
In this chapter I review the legacy of tabloid journalism in the context of digital media and discuss the transition from the strong editorial identity of tabloid newsprint to content curation that is both user-generated and created by paid staff members. Although the terms broadsheet and tabloid stem initially from paper size and format, I rely on this distinction to refer to editorial decisions that define newspapers’ journalism standards, setting quality press (broadsheets) apart from popular newspapers (tabloids). I describe the heyday of tabloid journalism in the early twenty-first century, when newspapers shifted toward compact, visually appealing, and commuter-friendly editions featuring fewer stories with fewer words on each page and making space for the use of photography in storytelling. These structural changes to the process of newsmaking are reviewed in the context of the introduction of social networking technologies that once again disrupted newsmaking, with social media audiences behaving differently from the traditional readership of broadsheets and tabloids. I inquire whether entertainment-focused websites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed are positioned to displace the traditional tabloid media by churning out viral content that is mostly short, highly visual, sharable, and mostly accessed through mobile devices. In short, this chapter reviews the key assumptions underlying the opposition between broadsheet and tabloid in the context of digital journalism and offers a discussion on viral news websites and the personalization of news amplified by fragmented networked audiences. The article offers a contribution to the understanding of the world of tabloid journalism in the context of digital media
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Tweeting News Articles Readership and News Sections in Europe and the Americas
In this article we investigate the impact of social media readership to the editorial profile of newspapers. We analyze tweets containing links to news articles from eight of the largest national newspapers in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Germany. The data collection follows the first two weeks of October 2012 and includes 2,842,699 tweets with links to news articles. Twitter-shortened links were resolved using a three-pass routine and assigned to 1 of the 21 newspaper sections. We found the concentration of links to news articles posted by top users to be lower than reported in the literature and the strategy of relaying headlines on Twitter via automatic news aggregators (feeds) to be inefficient. The results of this investigation show which sections of a newspaper are the most and least read by readers in different parts of the world, with German readers placing greater emphasis on Politics and Economy; Brazilians on Sports and Arts; Spaniards on Local and National news; Britons and Americans on Opinion and World news. We also found that German and Spanish readers are more likely to read multiple national newspapers, while British readers more often resort to foreign sources of news. The results confirm that feedback to news items from a large user base is pivotal for the replication of content and that newspapers and news items can be clustered according to the editorial profile and principles of newsworthiness inherited from legacy media. The results of this investigation shed light onto the networked architecture of journalism that increasingly depends on readership agency
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Serial Activists: Political Twitter Beyond Influentials and the Twittertariat
This paper introduces a group of politically-charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term serial activists. We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically-coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power. We found that these users have an ordinary following, but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes. Serial activists differ from influentials or traditional grassroots activists and their activity challenges Twitter scholarship foregrounding the two-step flow model of communication. The results add a much needed depth to the prevalent data-driven treatment of political Twitter by describing a class of extraordinarily prolific users beyond influentials and the twittertariat
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"Donald Trump is my President!" The Internet Research Agency Propaganda Machine
This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 user profiles and 6377 tweets posted by the agency between 2012 and 2017. We manually coded the source as identifiable, obfuscated, or impersonated and classified the campaign target of IRA operations using an inductive typology based on profile descriptions, images, location, language, and tweeted content. The qualitative variables were analyzed as relative frequencies to test the extent to which the IRA’s black, grey, and white propaganda are deployed with clearly-defined targets for short, medium, and long-term propaganda strategies. The results show that source classification from propaganda theory remains a valid framework to understand IRA’s propaganda machine and that the agency operates a composite of different user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, including openly pro-Russian profiles, local American and German news sources, pro-Trump conservatives, and black lives matter activists
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The Public Accountability of Social Platforms: Lessons from a Study on Bots and Trolls in the Brexit Campaign
In this article we review our study of 13,493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted the U.K. European Union membership referendum and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation, and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers’ access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public Application Programming Interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy
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Being a Serial Transnational Activist
Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term “engagement compass” to address the relationship between activists' life-patterns and their personal investment in protest over time
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Robustness and the Paradox of Bridging Organizations: The Exit Problem in Regional Water Governance Networks in Central America
Bridging organizations facilitate a range of governance processes, including cooperation and social learning, and are theorized to be a key component of robust governance systems. In this article, we use node removal simulations to test structural hypotheses of robustness in a regional water governance network in Central America. We investigate the response of network measures supporting core governance processes to the targeted removal of bridging organizations and other actors, which we compare to random and centrality-based simulations. The results indicate removing bridging organizations has a greater impact on the network than any other type of actor, suggesting bridging organizations are critical to the robustness of the governance system. Furthermore, network structures supporting cooperation may be less robust than structures facilitating social learning. We conclude with policy implications of the research findings as they relate to the exit problem in governance systems with a large presence of international development actors
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The Geographic Embedding of Online Echo Chambers: Evidence from the Brexit Campaign
This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit campaign. We review the evidence positing that online interactions lead to filter bubbles to test whether echo chambers are restricted to online patterns of interaction or are associated with physical, in-person interaction. We identify the location of users, estimate their partisan affiliation, and finally calculate the distance between sender and receiver of @-mentions and retweets. We show that polarized online echo-chambers map onto geographically situated social networks. More specifically, our results reveal that echo chambers in the Leave campaign are associated with geographic proximity and that the reverse relationship holds true for the Remain campaign. The study concludes with a discussion of primary and secondary effects arising from the interaction between existing physical ties and online interactions and argues that the collapsing of distances brought by internet technologies may foreground the role of geography within one’s social network
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