Jacob Groshek

Public Sentiment and Critical Framing in Social Media Content During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign

By being embedded in everyday life, social networking sites (SNSs) have altered the way campaign politics are understood and engaged with by politicians and citizens alike. However, the actual content of social media has remained a vast but somewhat amorphous and understudied entity. The study reported here examines public sentiment as it was expressed in just over 1.42 million social media units on Facebook and Twitter to provide broad insights into dominant topics and themes that were prevalent in the 2012 U.S. election campaign online. Key findings include the fact that contrary to what one might expect, neither presidential candidate was framed in an overly critical manner in his opponent’s Facebook space nor on Twitter’s dedicated nonpartisan election page. Beyond this, similarities and divergences in sentiment across social media spaces are observed that allow for a better understanding of what is being communicated in political social media.

Embedding the Internet in the Lives of College Students

The Internet is increasingly becoming embedded in the lives of most American citizens. College students constitute a group who have made particularly heavy use of the technology for everything from downloading music to distance education to instant messaging. Researchers know a lot about the uses made of the Internet by this group of people but less about the relationship between their offline activities and online behavior. This study reports the results of a web survey of a group of university undergraduates exploring the nature of both online and offline in five areas—the use of news and information, the discussion of politics, the seeking of health information, the use of blogs, and the downloading of media and software.

Agenda Trending: Reciprocity and the Predictive Capacity of Social Networking Sites in Intermedia Agenda Setting across Topics over Time

In the contemporary converged media environment, agenda setting is being transformed by the dramatic growth of audiences that are simultaneously media users and producers. The study reported here addresses related gaps in the literature by first comparing the topical agendas of two leading traditional media outlets (New York Times and CNN) with the most frequently shared stories and trending topics on two widely popular Social Networking Sites (Facebook and Twitter). Time-series analyses of the most prominent topics identify the extent to which traditional media sets the agenda for social media as well as reciprocal agendasetting effects of social media topics entering traditional media agendas. In addition, this study examines social intermedia agenda setting topically and across time within social networking sites, and in so doing, adds a vital understanding of where traditional media, online uses, and social media content intersect around instances of focusing events, particularly elections. Findings identify core differences between certain traditional and social media agendas, but also within social media agendas that extend from uses examined here. Additional results further suggest important topical and event-oriented limitations upon the predictive capacity of social networking sites to shape traditional media agendas over time.

Online Media and Offline Empowerment in Post- Rebellion Tunisia: An Analysis of Internet Use during Democratic Transition

ABSTRACT Social media are reputed to have played a crucial role in mobilizing citizens against autocratic governments in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. In Tunisia, digital activists successfully used social media to organize the popular protests that ousted President Ben Ali in January 2011. However, the phase of mobilizing protest to overthrow an established authority is different from constructing a political order to replace that authority. Hence the question arises: In what ways can social media contribute to democratic transitions beyond popular rebellion? This article focuses on the attitudinal factors that lie at the heart of cultural-behavioral approaches to democratization. A key element in the democratic consolidation of post-autocratic societies is the development of a participatory political culture, which, among other factors, depends on citizens’ perceived political efficacy. Using data obtained from a Web survey among 610 Tunisian Internet users, we test the degree to which respondents’ political use of the Internet during the Tunisian uprising influenced their levels of internal political efficacy and whether this shift in attitudes is positively related to measurable changes in electoral participation from authoritarian to post-authoritarian rule.

Double differentiation in a cross-national comparison of populist political movements and online media uses in the United States and the Netherlands

In a context of highly visible and politically influential populist movements, this study considers the online self-representation of the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) in the United States and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands. A multi-methodological approach was adopted to compare the discursive manifestation of key populism concepts: leadership characteristics, adversary definition and mobilizing information. Analyses reconstruct and account for similarities and differences in discursive framing strategies of ‘double differentiation’ through which both movements attempt inclusion in and exclusion from the political establishment, and, in doing so, mobilize communities of support. Altogether, this study advances the understanding of what constitutes ‘unmediated’ content that is presented through user-generated media production, and how self-determined media spaces have facilitated shifts in populist media legitimation and political representation in two politically unique countries.

Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign

ABSTRACT Undoubtedly, populist political candidates from the right and the left, including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, changed the tenor and direction of the 2016 presidential contest in the US. Much like Barack Obama’s electoral successes that were credited at least in part to his savvy social media campaigning in 2008 and 2012, since Trump’s victory, the notion that social media ‘helped him win’ has been revitalized, even by Trump himself [McCormick, R. (2016a). Donald Trump says Facebook and Twitter ‘helped him win’. The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13619148/trump-facebook-twitter-helped-win]. This study therefore explores citizen support for populist and establishment candidates across the ideological spectrum in the US to specifically examine if using social media was related to an increased likelihood of supporting populist presidential political candidates, including Trump. Differing forms of active, passive, and uncivil social media were taken into account and the findings suggest active social media use for politics was actually related to less support for Republican populists, such as Trump, but that forms of both passive or uncivil social media use were linked to an increase in the likelihood of support to a level roughly equivalent to that of the traditional television viewing. These patterns are almost the inverse of support for Democratic populists, in this case namely Sanders.

Forecasting and observing: A cross-methodological consideration of Internet and mobile phone diffusion in the Egyptian revolt

This study examines the Egyptian revolt (see Zhuo et al., 2011) of January/February 2011 from two discrete perspectives. The first perspective is a contextual marker that takes into account long-term and forecast trends in democracy from 1952 through 2011. The second perspective reports the opinions and viewpoints of Egyptian citizens living in a remote fishing village and resort town through impromptu in-person interviews conducted between 23 and 30 January 2011. The statistical findings evidence that the Internet and mobile phones have helped to facilitate sociopolitical instability and democratic change over time, while the personal interviews paradoxically suggest circumspection in making generalizations about how these events have proceeded across a large population and through a period of tightly suppressed communication when Internet access was shut down. Taken together, characterizing the events in Egypt as having been just a social media revolution therefore appears to misrepresent the evolution of political change in the country through this time period.

Coverage of the pre-Iraq War debate as a case study of frame indexing

This study examined critical coverage, substantive news frames, and news sources in The New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the pre-Iraq War debate. This content analysis evaluated media coverage before and after Congress passed the resolution that authorized the use of military force in Iraq. Results demonstrated that Congressional consensus was related to diminished frequencies of critical and substantively framed paragraphs in coverage yet the ongoing international debate sustained relatively more intense levels of critical coverage after the resolution passed than before. Substantively framed coverage, however, declined across all source types and levels of measurement after the Congressional resolution. In sum, the observed increase in the level of consensus within the US government seemed to influence coverage of the pre-Iraq War debate as it continued within and among other groups, such that substantive news frames were indexed to this shift in the tone, intensity, and focus of the policy debate. These findings therefore suggest a level of integration between indexing and framing in which an increased level of official consensus may be predictive of not only certain tones of coverage but also certain news frames being adopted over others.

Social Media Use in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Abstract:Patients with chronic illnesses such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) have been more keen to utilize the Internet and in particular, social media to obtain patient educational information in recent years. It is important for the gastroenterologist to be aware of these modalities and how they might affect information exchange and ultimately, disease management. This article addresses the current prevalence of social media use, advent of mobile health applications, social media usage in patients with chronic conditions, usage amongst providers, and most notably, the usage and preferences in IBD patients. Over the last decade there has been an increasing desire from patients to receive educational material about their disease through social media. We reviewed the medical literature on the quality of IBD-related information on social media. Given the disparity of information available on the Internet, we remark on the quality of this information and stress the need for further research to assess the validity of IBD information posted on social media.

The affordance effect: Gatekeeping and (non)reciprocal journalism on Twitter

Abstract This study examines contemporary gatekeeping as it intersects with the evolving technological affordances of social media platforms and the ongoing negotiation of professionalized journalistic norms and routines in contentious politics. Beginning with a corpus of just over 4.2 million Tweets about the racially charged Ferguson, Missouri protests, a series of network analyses were applied to track shifts over time and to identify influential actors in this communicative space. These models informed further analyses that indicated legacy news organizations and affiliated journalists were least present and only marginally engaged in covering these events, and that other users on Twitter emerged as far more prominent gatekeepers. Methodological considerations and implications about the importance of dialogic and reciprocal activities for journalism are discussed.