Research examining online political forums has until now been overwhelmingly guided by two broad perspectives: (1) a deliberative conception of democratic communication and (2) a diverse collection ...of incommensurable multi-sphere approaches. While these literatures have contributed many insightful observations, their disadvantages have left many interesting communicative dynamics largely unexplored. This article seeks to introduce a new framework for evaluating online political forums (based on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Lincoln Dahlberg) that addresses the shortcomings of prior approaches by identifying three distinct, overlapping models of democracy that forums may manifest: the liberal, the communitarian and the deliberative democratic. For each model, a set of definitional variables drawn from the broader online forum literature is documented and discussed.
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in ...disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.
Despite the fact that intercoder reliability is an indispensable validity criterion for studies that employ content analysis, currently available options for calculating it are sharply limited both ...in terms of the number of coefficients they offer and the range of operating systems they support. This paper introduces ReCal, an online intercoder reliability Web service that addresses both of these limitations by offering multiple coefficients for nominal-level data and by functioning through any Web browser regardless of OS. After describing the program's functions, its accuracy is demonstrated through a set of worked examples and a systematic comparison of its results to those of alternative reliability calculators. Finally, ReCal's usage statistics are briefly presented. Adapted from the source document.
Communication aimed at promoting civic engagement may become problematic when citizen roles undergo historic changes. In the current era, younger generations are embracing more expressive styles of ...actualizing citizenship defined around peer content sharing and social media, in contrast to earlier models of dutiful citizenship based on one‐way communication managed by authorities. An analysis of 90 youth Web sites operated by diverse civic and political organizations in the United States reveals uneven conceptions of citizenship and related civic skills, suggesting that many established organization are out of step with changing civic styles.
Communiquer l’engagement civique : un contraste de modèles de citoyenneté dans la sphère web jeunesse
La communication qui vise la promotion de l’engagement civique peut devenir problématique lorsque les rôles des citoyens subissent des changements historiques. Actuellement, les générations plus jeunes adoptent les styles plus démonstratifs de la citoyenneté actualisante (AC), définie autour du partage de contenu avec les pairs et les médias sociaux, par contraste avec les modèles antérieurs de la citoyenneté respectueuse (CR), basée sur la communication unidirectionnelle gérée par les autorités. Une analyse de 90 sites web jeunesse gérés par diverses organisations civiques et politiques aux États‐Unis révèle des conceptions variables de la citoyenneté et des compétences civiques qui y sont liées, ce qui suggère que plusieurs organisations établies sont en décalage par rapport aux styles civiques en changement.
Mots clés : implication civique, citoyenneté, implication en ligne, analyse web, web civique, implication des jeunes
W. Lance Bennett, Chris Wells & Deen Freelon
Bürgerbeteiligung kommunizieren: Konträre Modelle von Bürgerschaft in der Websphäre Jugendlicher
Bemühungen, die Beteiligung der Bürger mittels Kommunikation zu fördern, können dann problematisch werden, wenn sich die Rollen des Bürgers in historischen Umbrüchen befinden. Heutzutage nutzen die jüngeren Generationen deutlich expressivere Wege, sich als Bürger zu verwirklichen, insbesondere indem sie Inhalte mit Gleichaltrigen teilen und sich in sozialen Medien bewegen. Im Gegensatz dazu basieren frühere Modelle des gehorsamen Bürgers auf einer einseitigen Kommunikation unter Anleitung von Autoritäten. Eine Analyse von 90 Webseiten für Jugendliche, betrieben von verschiedenen bürgerlichen und politischen Organisationen in den USA, zeigt eine unausgewogene Konzeptualisierung von Bürgerschaft und den damit verbundenen Fähigkeiten des Bürgers. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass viele etablierte Organisationen den aktuellen Veränderungen bürgerliche Stile nicht angemessen begegnen.
Schlüsselbegriffe: bürgerliches Engagement, Online‐Engagement, Webanalyse, bürgerliches Web, Jugendengagement
We investigated the effects of Facebook's and Instagram's feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the ...default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users' on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.
Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group ...identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counter-responses from diverse coalitions of users.
Race has been a consequential factor in politics for centuries, yet our review of the political communication literature finds only sporadic interest in the topic. To examine systematically how and ...how much political communication research has addressed race, we analyze author-supplied keywords in nine journals within three broad categories (political communication, generalist communication, and critical communication) over 31 years. Combining computational methods and traditional content analysis, we find that political communication and generalist journals engaged with race substantially less than critical journals, and that this level of engagement has remained essentially flat since the mid-1990s. Political communication journals discussed racism least among the three journal types, and specific political communication theories appeared rarely across the board. Finally, addressing race did not predict journal impact factor.
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We ...compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increases as we shift from potential exposure to actual exposure to engagement; (ii) there is an asymmetry between conservative and liberal audiences, with a substantial corner of the news ecosystem consumed exclusively by conservatives; and (iii) most misinformation, as identified by Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, exists within this homogeneously conservative corner, which has no equivalent on the liberal side. Sources favored by conservative audiences were more prevalent on Facebook's news ecosystem than those favored by liberals.
Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term "engagement" vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists' roles on social media where ..."engagement" is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as "engagement specialists" about their responsibilities in interactive spaces. In addition, we analyze what kinds of engagement are happening in these spaces, and how citizens' expectations are being articulated, in terms of journalist-audience relationship-an organic resultant of engagement. We found that journalists are taking on new kinds of roles in social spaces-often in the name of "engagement"-but that work is not always particularly interactive with citizens; rather, content is engaged with. In contrast, citizens look to journalists to play a number of roles that range from civic guide to therapist. Thus, relationship building happens sporadically. Furthermore, engagement level is dependent on the platform and its affordances. This research offers a continuum of social media engagement conceived as relationship building that can reconcile the disparities in how we define engagement, and suggests newsrooms appreciate the nuances via a series of recommendations.
We studied the effects of exposure to reshared content on Facebook during the 2020 US election by assigning a random set of consenting, US-based users to feeds that did not contain any reshares over ...a 3-month period. We find that removing reshared content substantially decreases the amount of political news, including content from untrustworthy sources, to which users are exposed; decreases overall clicks and reactions; and reduces partisan news clicks. Further, we observe that removing reshared content produces clear decreases in news knowledge within the sample, although there is some uncertainty about how this would generalize to all users. Contrary to expectations, the treatment does not significantly affect political polarization or any measure of individual-level political attitudes.
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