Facebook is a news editor: the real issues to be concerned about

Natali Helberger and Damian Trilling, both of the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Information Law (IViR), write that whilst Facebook’s use of human editors may bring comfort to some, there are wider issues to do with editorial responsibility that need to be addressed

Is it possible to regulate broadcasting for ‘Distinctiveness’?

Founding Director of the Media Policy Project Damian Tambini offers a view on the recently-published white paper about the future of the BBC

Drivers of News Sharing: How Context, Content, and User Features Shape Sharing Decisions on Facebook

What makes people share political news on Facebook? Prior studies have identified how different features predict audiences’ likelihood to share news on social media – the so-called shareworthiness of news. However, we still know very little about the relative contributions of these different features for predicting why people decide to share news. We extend the literature by using an experimental design that can compare the relative importance of several key features that contribute to shaping citizens’ sharing decisions: a conjoint experimental design. We use an identical layout to Facebook and a probability sample of Norwegian citizens. We find that particularly content characteristics are important, and that popularity cues and message congruence is conditional on some user characteristics such as age.publishedVersio

Delighting and Detesting Engagement : Emotional Politics of Junk News

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform's "emotional architecture" intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly "loved" and highly "angering." We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded "us" versus "them" dynamic is both enforced by Facebook's emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.Peer reviewe

The Role of Media Coverage in Explaining Stock Market Fluctuations: Insights for Strategic Financial Communication

This study investigates the reciprocal relationships between the fluctuation of the closing prices of three companies listed on the Amsterdam exchange index, namely ING, Philips and Shell and online media coverage related to these firms for a period of two years (2014–2015). Automated content analysis methods were employed to analyze sentiment and emotionality and to identify corporate topics related to the companies. A positive relation of the amount of coverage and emotionality with the fluctuation of stock prices was detected for Shell and Philips. In addition, corporate topics were found to positively Granger cause stock price fluctuation, particularly for Philips. The study advances past research in showing that the prediction of stock price fluctuation based on media coverage can be improved by including sentiment, emotionality, and corporate topics. The findings inform strategic communication, and particularly investor relations, in suggesting that media attention, sentiment, and certain corporate topics are crucial when managing media relations and with regard to securing a fair evaluation of listed companies. Furthermore, the innovative research methods are useful for researchers and practitioners alike in showcasing how media coverage related to firms and their stock fluctuations can be identified and analyzed in a reproducible, hands-on and efficient manner

Electoral news sharing: a study of changes in news coverage and Facebook sharing behaviour during the 2018 Mexican elections

Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elections transform news sharing behaviour on Facebook. This study begins to remedy this by (a) investigating changes in news coverage and news sharing behaviour on Facebook by comparing election and routine periods, and by (b) addressing the ‘news gap’ between preferences of journalists and news consumers on social media. Employing a novel data set of news articles (N = 83,054) in Mexico, findings show that during periods of heightened political activity, both the publication and dissemination of political news increases, the gap between the news choices of journalists and consumers narrows, and that news sharing resembles a zero-sum game, with increased political news sharing leading to a decrease in the sharing of other news

Talking with and about Politicians on Twitter: An Analysis of Tweets Containing @-mentions of Candidates in the Brazilian Presidential Elections

While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion.While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion

damian0604/conjointstimulus: Digital Journalism

stimulus for conjoint experiment with Eri

Political relevance in the eye of the beholder: Determining the substantiveness of TV shows and political debates with Twitter data

Addressing the call to move beyond a simple genre classification of TV shows as either substantive (hard) news or non-substantive (soft) infotainment, we propose using social media reactions to determine a program’s political relevance. Such an approach provides information that goes beyond genre or content characteristics and reflects what really reaches an audience. Analyzing tweets about two Dutch talk shows and four U.S. primary debates, we show that audience responses to television programs differ considerably regarding their political relevance. Thereby, we demonstrate how examining online audience reactions can be employed as a sophisticated and valid way to assess the political relevance of TV programs