Marco Toledo Bastos

Gatekeeping Twitter: Message diffusion in political hashtags

This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine variables of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative scenario to the dominant view regarding gatekeeping in Twitter political hashtags. Instead of depending on hubs that act as gatekeepers, we found that the intense activity of individuals with relatively few connections is capable of generating highly replicated messages that contributed to Trending Topics without relying on the activity of user hubs. The results support the thesis of social consensus through the influence of committed minorities, which states that a prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction of randomly distributed committed agents.

Shares, Pins, and Tweets: News Readership from Daily Papers to Social Media

This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the topics emphasized by newspaper editors and social media users. While users of social media platforms favor opinion pieces, along with national, local, and world news, in sharp contrast the decision of news editors emphasized sports and the economy, but also entertainment and celebrity news. Common to social networking sites is the prevalence of items about arts, technology, and opinion pieces. Niche social networks like StumbleUpon and Delicious presented a greater volume of articles about science and technology, while Pinterest is mostly dedicated to fashion, arts, lifestyle, and entertainment. Twitter is the only social network to have presented a statistically significant correlation with the distribution of news items per section by The Guardian and The New York Times. The results of this study provide a bridge between journalism and audience research and present evidence of the differences between readership in social and legacy media.

Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat

This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power. We found that these users have an ordinary following, but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes. Serial activists differ from influentials or traditional grassroots activists and their activity challenges Twitter scholarship foregrounding the two-step flow model of communication. The results add a much needed depth to the prevalent data-driven treatment of political Twitter by describing a class of extraordinarily prolific users beyond influentials and the twittertariat.

Tweeting across hashtags: overlapping users and the importance of language, topics, and politics

In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtags related to a wide range of topics (political activism, health, technology, sports, Twitter-idioms). We find that 70% of users in the sample tweet across multiple information streams, frequently engaging in what could be described as serial activism. We furthermore determined the dominant language in each hashtag to trace which users overlap between the thematic and linguistic communities delineated by different information streams. Although social media is frequently assumed to bring together people of different nationalities and cultures to discuss a wide range of controversial issues, our results indicate that the underlying social network that connects hashtags through overlapping users is heavily limited to linguistic and content-oriented communities. Information streams are clustered around linguistic communities, and hashtags within the same language group are clustered around well-defined topics, such as health, entertainment and politics. The only information streams that transcend language barriers are activism-related hashtags, which cluster information streams in different languages. Contrasting with the assumption that social media acts as the enabler of a globalized public debate, our results indicate a linear relationship between users who are very active in political hashtags and users who tweet across multiple political hashtags. The results suggest that activist campaigns based on social media are driven by a relatively small number of highly-active, politically engaged users.

Tweeting News Articles Readership and News Sections in Europe and the Americas

In this article we investigate the impact of social media readership to the editorial profile of newspapers. We analyze tweets containing links to news articles from eight of the largest national newspapers in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Germany. The data collection follows the first two weeks of October 2012 and includes 2,842,699 tweets with links to news articles. Twitter-shortened links were resolved using a three-pass routine and assigned to 1 of the 21 newspaper sections. We found the concentration of links to news articles posted by top users to be lower than reported in the literature and the strategy of relaying headlines on Twitter via automatic news aggregators (feeds) to be inefficient. The results of this investigation show which sections of a newspaper are the most and least read by readers in different parts of the world, with German readers placing greater emphasis on Politics and Economy; Brazilians on Sports and Arts; Spaniards on Local and National news; Britons and Americans on Opinion and World news. We also found that German and Spanish readers are more likely to read multiple national newspapers, while British readers more often resort to foreign sources of news. The results confirm that feedback to news items from a large user base is pivotal for the replication of content and that newspapers and news items can be clustered according to the editorial profile and principles of newsworthiness inherited from legacy media. The results of this investigation shed light onto the networked architecture of journalism that increasingly depends on readership agency.

Hashtags Functions in the Protests Across Brazil

In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also qualitatively analyzed a group of 500 most retweeted tweets to understand the users’ tagging behavior. Our results show how users appropriate tags to accomplish different effects on the narrative of the protests.

How digital are the Digital Humanities? An analysis of two scholarly blogging platforms.

In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts.

O discurso dos #ProtestosBR: análise de conteúdo do Twitter

This paper focus on an analysis of the discourse of Twitter messages during the protests in Brazil during June 2013. Our objective is to discuss how the concepts relate to each other and form networks of meanings around the tweets about the protests. Our search for common characteristics and elements reveals how Twitter was used to describe the protests and to mobilize people rather than to discuss what was actually taking place. We describe the key actors, contexts and demands, as well as the focus on live narratives, #pamphleteer hashtags, and the specific location of tweets.

Do sentido da mediação: as margens do pensamento de Jesús Martín-Barbero

The work of Jesus Martin-Barbero supplied communication studies with remarkable theoretical contributions, even though his analysis is focused on specific cultural experiences related to Latin American background. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the range of a specific concept in his theory for communication studies: the idea of mediations. This very idea nonetheless will not have clear outlines until associated with another concept, at first not really important to MartinBarbero’s theory of mediation: the meaning.

Core-periphery or decentralized? Topological shifts of specialized information on Twitter

Abstract In this paper we investigate shifts in Twitter network topology resulting from the type of information being shared. We identified communities matching areas of agricultural expertise and measured the core-periphery centralization of network formations resulting from users sharing generic versus specialized information. We found that centralization increases when specialized information is shared and that the network adopts decentralized formations as conversations become more generic. The results are consistent with classical diffusion models positing that specialized information comes with greater centralization, but they also show that users favor decentralized formations, which can foster community cohesion, when spreading specialized information is secondary.