As the reach of science content in traditional media declines, many institutions and scientists are turning to YouTube as a powerful tool for communicating directly with non-expert publics. They do ...so with little empirical social science research guiding their efforts. This study explores how video characteristics and social endorsement cues provided by audience members might influence user engagement with online science videos. Shorter videos are more likely to be viewed. Social endorsement cues significantly relate to variations in user engagement, with likes having a consistent positive association with all types of engagement. Implications for science communication through YouTube are discussed.
Uncivil discourse is a growing concern in American rhetoric, and this trend has expanded beyond traditional media to online sources, such as audience comments. Using an experiment given to a sample ...representative of the U.S. population, we examine the effects online incivility on perceptions toward a particular issue—namely, an emerging technology, nanotechnology. We found that exposure to uncivil blog comments can polarize risk perceptions of nanotechnology along the lines of religiosity and issue support.
Some people live in social media “news deserts,” while others are embedded in online networks that are rich in news content. These news deserts represent a new form of digital inequality—distinct ...from problems of access, resources, or civic skills—that could foreclose one of the ways social media are believed to contribute to informing citizens and engaging them in democratic processes: providing opportunities for incidental news exposure. This study investigates incidental exposure on social media platforms, drawing on an online survey administered just before the 2018 US Midterm Elections (N = 1493). The study finds that even after controlling for key individual-level factors, characteristics of social media discussion networks play a role in explaining variation in incidental exposure. The results are discussed in light of prevailing theory about incidental exposure, public engagement, and digital inequalities.
Social media is pervasive in the lives of young people, and this paper critically analyses how politically engaged young people integrate social media use into their existing organisations and ...political communications. This qualitative research project studied how young people from a broad range of existing political and civic groups use social media for sharing information, mobilisation and, increasingly, as a means to redefine political action and political spaces. Twelve in-person focus groups were conducted in Australia, the USA and the UK with matched affinity groups based on university campuses. The groups were of four types: party political group, issue-based group, identity-based group and social group. Our focus group findings suggest that this in-depth approach to understanding young people's political engagement reveals important group-based differences emerging in young people's citizenship norms: between the dutiful allegiance to formal politics and a more personalised, self-actualising preference for online, discursive forms of political engagement and organising. The ways in which political information is broadcast, shared and talked about on social media by engaged young people demonstrate the importance of communicative forms of action for the future of political engagement and connective action.
Interest in public engagement with science activities has grown in recent decades, especially engagement through social media and among graduate students. Research on scientists' views of engagement, ...particularly two-way engagement and engagement through social media, is sparse, particularly research examining graduate students' views. We compare graduate students and faculty in biological and physical sciences at a land-grant, research-intensive university in their views on engagement. We find that both groups overwhelmingly believe that public input in decision-making around science issues is important, and hold largely pro-engagement attitudes. Graduate students, however, have somewhat more optimistic views of engagement through social media and on the appropriateness of discussing science controversy on social media. We discuss implications for graduate education and future engagement.
Political candidates increasingly have incorporated social media tools like Facebook into their campaigns. Such tools enable supporters to interact directly and easily with campaigns, creating an ...immediate and relatively informal way for users to respond to candidate messages and publicly display their support. Previous research has explored how campaigns have used social media, or how the use of social media may be related to political engagement. In this study, we provide a systematic analysis of variations in user response to candidate messaging through Facebook. Our results shed new light on the dynamics of online campaigning through social media and engagement with supporters through digital media. Specifically, our findings show that variations in the tone, timing, and content of posts, as distinct from contextual factors, are significantly related to how users respond through “likes” and comments.
Recent technological developments have created novel opportunities for analyzing and identifying patterns in large volumes of digital content. However, many content analysis tools require researchers ...to choose between the validity of human-based coding and the ability to analyze large volumes of content through computer-based techniques. This study argues for the use of supervised content analysis tools that capitalize on the strengths of human- and computer-based coding for assessing opinion expression. We begin by outlining the key methodological issues surrounding content analysis as performed by human coders and existing computational algorithms. After reviewing the most popular analytic approaches, we introduce an alternative, hybrid method that is aimed at improving reliability, validity, and efficiency when analyzing social media content. To demonstrate the usefulness of this method, we track nuclear energy- and nanotechnology-related opinion expression on Twitter surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi accident to examine the extent to which the volume and tone of tweets shift in directions consistent with the expected external influence of the event. Our analysis revealed substantial shifts in both the volume and tone of nuclear power-related tweets that were consistent with our expectations following the disaster event. Conversely, there was decidedly more stability in the volume and tone of tweets for our comparison issue. These analyses provide an empirical demonstration of how the presented hybrid method can analyze defined communication sentiment and topics from large-scale social media data sets. The implications for communication scholars are discussed.
From time to time, some social media users avoid content posted by specific people in their networks. Most research on such selective avoidance has focused on individual motivations and other ...psychological factors rather than on social network characteristics, and there is a need for a systematic analysis of the relationships between individuals’ social media networks and selective avoidance. This study fills that gap in the literature, drawing on theory about egocentric or personal publics. We test our predictions using data from three surveys of adults in the United States, collected just before each of the last three major national elections. Results are discussed in light of theory about the role of media technology in shaping political communication and scholarly discourse about how selective avoidance affects information flows.
Political communication researchers commonly use one of two strategies to measure online network diversity: a "subjective" approach tapping participants' impressions of the diversity in their ...networks, or a "structural" approach that asks about the socioeconomic position of individuals within their networks. While these measures are largely treated as functional equivalents in research about information technology and politics, we demonstrate that the two measures are only moderately correlated, and there are systematic differences in the reliability and validity of the two measures. We conclude that the structural measure is the better choice for most studies, although the subjective measure may be more appropriate in some cases.
Using the Zika outbreak as a context of inquiry, this study examines how assigning blame on social media relates to the social amplification of risk framework (SARF). Past research has discussed the ...relationship between the SARF and traditional mass media, but the role of social media platforms in amplification or attenuation of risk perceptions remains understudied. Moreover, the communication and perceptions of Zika‐related risk are not limited to discussions in English. To capture conversations in languages spoken by affected countries, this study combines data in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. To better understand the assignment of blame and perceptions of risk in new media environments, we looked at three different facets of conversations surrounding Zika on Facebook and Twitter: the prominence of blame in each language, how specific groups were discussed throughout the Zika outbreak, and the sentiment expressed about genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes. We combined machine learning with human coding to analyze public discourse in all three languages. We found differences between languages and platforms in the amount of blame assigned to different groups. We also found more negative sentiments expressed about GE mosquitoes on Facebook than on Twitter. These meaningful differences only emerge from analyses across the three different languages and platforms, pointing to the importance of multilingual approaches for risk communication research. Specific recommendations for outbreak and risk communication practitioners are also discussed.
PDF
