Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: a media systems approach

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates’ efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage.Accepted manuscrip

Cross-platform Analysis of Twitter and Parler during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

In the recent 2020 Presidential Election, President Trump and his campaign alleged that mail-in ballots were likely to be fraudulent and this claim stood against Twitter’s efforts to curb spreading of misinformation (Lima, 2020). This claim resulted in suspending those who participated in voter fraud misinformation (Twitter, 2021), including Trump himself. In response to Twitter’s action, Trump and those who supported Trump left Twitter, seeking an alternative social media. This migration was a strong collective action by users who felt more than simply constrained (Kiene, Monroy-Hernández & Hill, 2016) by a loss of belonging to the community when users faced increased censorship. Those who left Twitter found Parler as an alternative social networking service, which proclaims that they allow a user to “speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being deplatformed for your views” as an asylum. Parler has gained attention from conservatives who are looking for alternative social media, which supposedly accepts them for who they are. Based on this unique case, this study seeks to understand the impact of echo chambers on people’s expressed opinions on social media. Past research efforts on echo chambers, selective exposure, and network homogeneity (Stewart, Arif & Starbird, 2018; Jacobson, Myung & Johnson, 2016) mostly focused on a handful of popular social media, mostly either Facebook or Twitter, while neglecting the unique roles of other niche social media platforms in building online communities (Zannettou et al., 2018). We will address this critical gap by leveraging data from two social media platforms: Parler and Twitter as examples that represent distinctive user bases in terms of political ideology. We identify users who have the same account names on both platforms and examine the role of political homogeneity in the online opinion expression and sharing of information. We rely on the Social Identity Deindividuation Effects (SIDE) model to understand political behaviors of the users who used both Twitter and Parler. The SIDE model explains that deindividualization occurs when group norms are more salient and have a greater effect on individual behaviors than individual processes (Lea & Spears, 1992). The SIDE models focus on anonymity and explicit and implicit norms of online spaces, and supports that anonymity enhances the social influence processes and collective behavior (Spears, 2017). By applying this theoretical model, we are aiming to reveal how Parler’s homogeneous political climate – more conservative than Twitter – helped users to feel more anonymous than Twitter by providing a safe place for them to speak hatred. There are two research questions we wanted to answer. Our focus of interest is the people who used both Twitter and Parler and hereafter, they are called cross-platform users. RQ 1. Can we make use of the machine learning technique to identify the pattern of increasing or decreasing use of toxic language by cross-platform users in Twitter? RQ 2. Can we make use of the machine learning technique to identify the pattern of increasing or decreasing use of toxic language by cross-platform users in Parler?Ope

#Politics on Twitter goes beyond the left-right ideology divide

In U.S. politics, the main narrative tends to manifest as left vs right, Democrat vs. Republican, but is this reflected in the social media sphere as well? In new research which maps how hashtags in political tweets were used in the lead up to the 2010 Congressional midterm elections, Leticia Bode, Alex Hanna, JungHwan Yang, and Dhavan V. Shah found that some hashtags occurred in discussion groups that were there ideological opposite. They write that this ‘hashjacking’ was a way in which conservatives were able to enter and disrupt a more liberal community’s online discussion

Outlining the way ahead in computational communication science: an introduction to the IJoC special section on „Computational Methods for Communication Science: Toward a Strategic Roadmap“

Over the past two decades, processes of digitalization and mediatization have shaped the communication landscape and have had a strong impact on various facets of communication. The digitalization of communication results in completely new forms of digital traces that make communication processes observable in new and unprecedented ways. Although many scholars in the social sciences acknowledge the chances and requirements of the digital revolution in communication, they are also facing fundamental challenges in implementing successful research programs, strategies, and designs that are based on computational methods and “big data.” This Special Section aims at bringing together seminal perspectives on challenges and chances of computational communication science (CCS). In this introduction, we highlight the impulses provided by the research presented in the Special Section, discuss the most pressing challenges in the context of CCS, and sketch a potential roadmap for future research in this field

Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world.

Online political astroturfing-hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online-has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet's promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal-agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign's social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns

Mapping the Political Twitterverse: Finding Connections Between Political Elites

Twitter provides a new and important tool for politicalactors, and is increasingly being used as such. In the2010 midterm elections, the vast majority of candidates forthe U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidatesfor U.S. Senate and governorships used Twitter toreach out to potential supporters, direct them to particularpieces of information, request campaign contributions, andmobilize their political action. Despite the level of activity,we have little understanding of what the political Twitterverselooks like in terms of communication and discourse.This project seeks to remedy that lack of understandingby mapping candidates for federal office in 2010 and theirfollowers, according to their use of the 4016 most used hashtags(keywords). Our data set is uniquely constructed fromtweets of most of the candidates running for the U.S. Houseof Representatives in 2010, all the candidates for the Senateand governorships, and a random sample of their followers.From this we utilize multidimensional scaling to constructa visual map based on hashtag usage. We find that ourdata have both local and global interpretations that reflectnot only political leaning but also strategies of communication.This study provides insight into innovation in newmedia usage in political behavior, as well as a snapshot ofthe political twitterverse in 2010

Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign

Political astroturfing, a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently, has the potential to influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behavior. Yet, it is hard to evaluate the scope and effectiveness of political astroturfing without "ground truth" information, such as the verified identity of its agents and instigators. In this paper, we study the South Korean National Information Service's (NIS) disinformation campaign during the presidential election in 2012, taking advantage of a list of campaign accounts published in court proceedings. Features that best distinguish these accounts from regular users in contemporaneously collected Twitter data are traces left by coordination among astroturfing agents, instead of the individual account characteristics typically used in related approaches such as social bot detection. We develop a methodology that exploits these distinct empirical patterns to identify additional likely astroturfing accounts and validate this detection strategy by analyzing their messages and current account status. However, an analysis relying on Twitter influence metrics shows that the known and suspect NIS accounts only had a limited impact on political social media discussions. By using the principal-agent framework to analyze one of the earliest revealed instances of political astroturfing, we improve on extant methodological approaches to detect disinformation campaigns and ground them more firmly in social science theory.Ope

Predictors of the Change in the Expression of Emotional Support within an Online Breast Cancer Support Group: A Longitudinal Study

OBJECTIVES: To explore how the expression of emotional support in an online breast cancer support group changes over time, and what factors predict this pattern of change. METHODS: We conducted growth curve modeling with data collected from 192 participants in an online breast cancer support group within the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) during a 24-week intervention period. RESULTS: Individual expression of emotional support tends to increase over time for the first 12 weeks of the intervention, but then decrease slightly with time after that. In addition, we found that age, living situation, comfort level with computer and the Internet, coping strategies were important factors in predicting the changing pattern of expressing emotional support. CONCLUSIONS: Expressing emotional support changed in a quadratic trajectory, with a range of factors predicting the changing pattern of expression. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: These results can provide important information for e-health researchers and physicians in determining the benefits individuals can gain from participation in should CMSS groups as the purpose of cancer treatment

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Juxtaposing BTE and ATE – on the role of the European insurance industry in funding civil litigation

One of the ways in which legal services are financed, and indeed shaped, is through private insurance arrangement. Two contrasting types of legal expenses insurance contracts (LEI) seem to dominate in Europe: before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE) legal expenses insurance. Notwithstanding institutional differences between different legal systems, BTE and ATE insurance arrangements may be instrumental if government policy is geared towards strengthening a market-oriented system of financing access to justice for individuals and business. At the same time, emphasizing the role of a private industry as a keeper of the gates to justice raises issues of accountability and transparency, not readily reconcilable with demands of competition. Moreover, multiple actors (clients, lawyers, courts, insurers) are involved, causing behavioural dynamics which are not easily predicted or influenced. Against this background, this paper looks into BTE and ATE arrangements by analysing the particularities of BTE and ATE arrangements currently available in some European jurisdictions and by painting a picture of their respective markets and legal contexts. This allows for some reflection on the performance of BTE and ATE providers as both financiers and keepers. Two issues emerge from the analysis that are worthy of some further reflection. Firstly, there is the problematic long-term sustainability of some ATE products. Secondly, the challenges faced by policymakers that would like to nudge consumers into voluntarily taking out BTE LEI