Below the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Content—Introduction to the Special Issue

none3noopenBoccia Artieri, Giovanni; Brilli, Stefano; Zurovac, ElisabettaBoccia Artieri, Giovanni; Brilli, Stefano; Zurovac, Elisabett

Facebook digital traces for survey research: Assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of a Facebook ad–based procedure for recruiting online survey respondents in niche and difficult-to-reach populations

Survey-based studies are increasingly experimenting with strategies that employ digital footprints left by users on social media as entry points for recruiting participants and complementary data sources. In this perspective, the Facebook advertising platform provides unique opportunities and challenges through its marketing tools that target advertisements based on users’ demographics, behaviors, and interests. This article presents a procedure that employed the most recent developments in Facebook marketing tools to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of an innovative method for recruiting niche and traditionally hard-to-reach respondents. Although the multiple innovations introduced in the method hinder a proper comparison with previous studies, the survey provides evidence concerning the efficacy of the procedure and offers scholars a set of implementations to design future comparable Facebook ad–based surveys. Challenges, opportunities, and results for effectiveness are discussed in light of a previous survey on Italian adults carried out with a panel-based computer-assisted web interviewing method

The Genesis of Crisis Communication in Twitter: from Witnesses to Gatewatchers

During crisis events individuals look for information and try to share useful content or testify their own experience through social media. The research for valuable information is, relies largely on information provided by news agencies and official actors. This collective behavior leads, on a given amount of time, toward the emergence of gatewatching activities where digital media are used to reshare and to control information. This paper will investigate how this phenomenon emerge looking at the Twitter conversations produced during the first five hours after the earthquake that struck Emilia Romagna region in Italy on May 20th 2012. We have been able to detect, in the early user-led phase of the phenomenon, what kind of messages were produced and how user-produced communication results in different network structures