Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing (N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data (N = 17,989 web domains), news article data (N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users (N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news

Spaces of war, war of spaces

Spaces of War, War of Spaces provides a rich, international and multi-disciplinary engagement with the convergence of war and media through the conceptual lens of 'space'. 'Space' offers a profound, challenging and original framework through which notions of communication, embodiment, enactment, memory and power are interrogated not only in terms of how media spaces (traditional, digital, cultural, aesthetic, embodied, mnemonic) transform the conduct, outcomes and consequences of war for all involved, but how 'war' actors (political, military, survivors, victims) recreate space in a manner that is transformative across political, social, cultural and personal spheres. Foregrounding the work of artists, activists and practitioners alongside more traditional scholarly approaches Spaces of War, War of Spaces engages with the 'messiness' of war and media through the convergence of practice and theory, where showing and embodying is made explicit

Text mining and social media: when quantitative meets qualitative, and software meets humans [Working paper]

The ongoing production of staggeringly huge volumes of digital data is a ubiquitous part of life in the early twenty-first century. A large proportion of this data is text. This development has serious implications for almost all scholarly endeavour. It is now possible for researchers from a wide range of disciplines to use text mining techniques and software tools in their daily practice. In our own field of political communication, the prospect of cheap access to what, how, and to whom very large numbers of citizens communicate in social media environments provides opportunities that are often too good to miss as we seek to understand how and why citizens think and feel the way they do about policies, political organizations, and political events. But what are the methods and tools on offer, how should they best be used, and what sorts of ethical issues are raised by their use? In this article we proceed as follows. First, we provide a basic definition of text mining. Second, we provide examples of how text mining has been used recently in a diverse range of analytical contexts, from business to media to politics. Third, we discuss the challenges of conducting text mining in online social media environments, focusing on issues such as the problem of gaining access to social media data, research ethics, and the integrity of the data corpuses that are available from social media companies. Fourth, we present a basic but comprehensive survey of the text mining tools that are currently available. Finally, we present two brief case studies of the application of text mining in the authors’ field of political communication. We conclude with some observations about the proper place of text mining in social science research