Elizabeth Stoycheff

Under Surveillance Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring

Since Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s use of controversial online surveillance programs in 2013, there has been widespread speculation about the potentially deleterious effects of online government monitoring. This study explores how perceptions and justification of surveillance practices may create a chilling effect on democratic discourse by stifling the expression of minority political views. Using a spiral of silence theoretical framework, knowing one is subject to surveillance and accepting such surveillance as necessary act as moderating agents in the relationship between one’s perceived climate of opinion and willingness to voice opinions online. Theoretical and normative implications are discussed.

What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy? Deconstructing Internet Penetration and Citizen Attitudes About Governance

Recent world events have highlighted the democratic potential of information and communication technologies. This article draws upon the democracy literature to develop a multilevel conceptual framework that links country-level Internet penetration and individual-level Internet use to citizen attitudes about governance in 34 developing countries. In doing so, it deconstructs “Internet penetration” into three dimensions—hardware (e.g., computers), users, and broadband—to provide greater theoretical specificity about how Internet diffusion leads citizens to adopt democratic attitudes. Results from multilevel analyses indicate that individual Internet use and the diffusion of Internet hardware shape citizens’ perceptions of the supply of democracy in their countries, and individual Internet use and diffusion of broadband lead citizens to adopt stronger democratic preferences. Theoretical and normative implications are discussed.

Differential Effects of Capital-Enhancing and Recreational Internet Use on Citizens’ Demand for Democracy

This study seeks to contribute to the growing body of scholarship about the Internet’s role in authoritarian and transitioning countries. Based on two original surveys of Russian and Ukrainian Internet users, online behaviors were classified as either primarily capital enhancing or recreational in terms of their democratic potential. Indirect and differential models of how these types of Internet use are associated with citizen demand for democracy were tested using serial mediation. Capital-enhancing use exhibited an indirect positive effect on demand for democratic governance by increasing critical appraisals of the incumbent regime, whereas recreational Internet was associated with satisfactory evaluations of non-democratic regimes and more entrenched authoritarian worldviews.

What have we learned about social media by studying Facebook? A decade in review

A recent review published by Rains and Brunner documented an overwhelming preponderance of the Facebook brand in scholarship about social networking sites (SNS). This follow-up analysis shows that Facebook is still over-privileged when examining the broader umbrella of social media brands; the social networking hegemon constitutes over half of all scholarship across an array of social media, including SNS, media sharing sites, (micro)blogging platforms, virtual communities, and others. This study builds upon Rains and Brunner’s critiques about the over-reliance on the Facebook brand and calls for more scholarship that examines social media as part of larger media repertoires, is more inclusive of indigenous social media brands and their users, and provides greater diversity in terms of academic context. In doing, it serves as the most comprehensive review of social media scholarship to date. Implications for future research are discussed.

Agenda Cueing Effects of News and Social Media

ABSTRACT Agenda cues, in which individuals perceive that media has frequently covered a problem regardless of actual exposure to that coverage, have initially been shown to produce powerful agenda setting effects (Pingree and Stoycheff, 2013). This study uses two experiments to test the presence and prominence cueing effects across a variety of issues and whether the cue originates from traditional news or Twitter users. Agenda cues produced significant effects on five of six issues studied for news and four of six for Twitter. For one issue (gun control/rights), both types of agenda cues produced effect sizes rivaling those of the strongest effects found in Iyengar and Kinder’s (News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, University of Chicago Press, 1987) classic agenda setting experiments. On average, news agenda cues were stronger than Twitter agenda cues, and were about 78% as strong as classic news agenda setting effects, suggesting that cueing may be the dominant mechanism driving agenda setting effects. The role of gatekeeping trust as a moderator of agenda cueing was only inconsistently replicated.s

Please participate in Part 2: Maximizing response rates in longitudinal MTurk designs

The ease and affordability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk make it ripe for longitudinal, or panel, study designs in social science research. But the discipline has not yet investigated how incentives in this “online marketplace for work” may influence unit non-response over time. This study tests classic economic theory against social exchange theory and finds that despite Mechanical Turk’s transactional nature, expectations of reciprocity and social contracts are important determinants of participating in a study’s Part 2. Implications for future research are discussed.

Online Surveillance’s Effect on Support for Other Extraordinary Measures to Prevent Terrorism

The U.S. National Security Agency argues that online mass surveillance has played a pivotal role in preventing acts of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11. But journalists and academics have decried the practice, arguing that the implementation of such extraordinary provisions may lead to a slippery slope. As the first study to investigate empirically the relationship between online surveillance and support for other extraordinary measures to prevent terrorism, we find that perceptions of government monitoring lead to increased support for hawkish foreign policy through value-conflict associations in memory that prompt a suppression of others’ online and offline civil liberties, including rights to free speech and a fair trial. Implications for the privacy–security debate are discussed.

Privacy and the Panopticon: Online mass surveillance’s deterrence and chilling effects

The Panopticon is a popular metaphor in discussions about mass surveillance. Drawing on deterrence theory and chilling effects, we provide two empirical tests of this analogy to examine whether perceptions of online government surveillance suppress or entirely eradicate an array of sensitive online activities. Study 1 indicates that surveillance significantly deters individuals’ intentions to engage in illegal offenses, an effect that extends to political, but not privacy-protective behaviors. Study 2 retests the pervasiveness of this effect with a sample of Muslims who reside in the United States. Results indicate that restrictive chilling effects are not specific to any one online population, experimental stimuli, or political context. Implications for US political and social systems are discussed.

Setting a Non-Agenda: Effects of a Perceived Lack of Problems in Recent News or Twitter

The mere perception that news has given certain problems more coverage can lead the audience to assume that those problems are more important. Given that the news media, at times, obsesses over relatively trivial matters, and given that the audience is increasingly able to filter media exposure, it is worth asking what happens when audience members perceive that recent media coverage has not emphasized any very important problems. In such cases, audience members might assume that any problems facing the nation must not be particularly important. We explicate this attitude of political complacency, test whether perceived media agendas lacking important problems can influence it, and explore whether complacency helps explain political disengagement. We also explore whether these effects generalize beyond news, to new media gatekeepers such as Twitter. Two experiments tested effects of a perceived absence of important problems in recent news or Twitter content. In the case of news, but not Twitter, this increased complacency in both studies. Study 2 added a no-exposure control and found that effects on complacency were driven by the cueing of nonproblem stories, not by the absence of problem story cues. Both studies validated complacency as a predictor of political disengagement.