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The growing prominence of platforms in news consumption has raised scholarly concerns about potential impacts on trust in news, which has declined in many countries. However, less is known about how journalists themselves perceive this relationship, which matters for understanding how they use these technologies. In this paper, we draw on 85 interv...

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... The optimism of the first decade of this development, where digital participatory cultures would lead to more democratic societies (Jenkins et al., 2016), has however been replaced by more nuanced conclusions (Omanga et al., 2024;Srinivasan et al., 2022). Exemplary to this development is the role of social media in the spread of "fake news", misinformation and hate speech (Gargliardone, 2019;Roberts and Karekwaivenane, 2024;Ross Arguedas et al., 2022), leading up to polarized societies and escalating conflict. The relationship between such speech on SM platforms and its influence on conflict or violence is however very difficult to prove (Dafoe and Lyall, 2015). ...
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The study combines domain expertise and computational community detection to uncover what role citizen journalists and social media platforms play in mediating the dynamics of conflict in Mali. Under conditions of the growing conflict in Mali, citizen journalists are opening Twitter (rebranded as X) accounts to stay updated and tweet about the ongoing socio-political tensions, chronicling life in a conflict-ravaged context. This article conceptualizes the rapid reliance on Twitter among citizen journalists consisting of bloggers, activists, government officials and NGO’s as a form of networked conflict and networked journalism. Networked journalism emerges as professional journalists adopt tools and techniques used by nonprofessionals (and vice versa) to gather and disseminate information while networked conflict involves the consequential and intricate relationship between social media and conflict in the Sahel region of Africa. Our findings show that Twitter is a source of action that promotes and mediates conflict, which exposes users to conflict-related content. The findings also show that what accounts for citizen journalism in a conflict setting is vague as those with access to Twitter and as such, the presumed ability to influence the narrative, unequivocally consider themselves citizen journalists.
... Social media platforms have become an active site for the spread of misinformation on a wide range of topics and have received increased scrutiny for their role in undermining trust in scientific and journalistic expertise 5 . At the same time, these platforms are becoming an increasingly influential source of news and information that have an important role in shaping public awareness and discussion of issues of social importance 6 . ...
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Misinformation about climate change poses a substantial threat to societal well-being, prompting the urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. However, the rapid proliferation of online misinformation on social media platforms outpaces the ability of fact-checkers to debunk false claims. Automated detection of climate change misinformation offers a promising solution. In this study, we address this gap by developing a two-step hierarchical model. The Augmented Computer Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism (CARDS) model is specifically designed for categorising climate claims on Twitter. Furthermore, we apply the Augmented CARDS model to five million climate-themed tweets over a six-month period in 2022. We find that over half of contrarian climate claims on Twitter involve attacks on climate actors. Spikes in climate contrarianism coincide with one of four stimuli: political events, natural events, contrarian influencers, or convinced influencers. Implications for automated responses to climate misinformation are discussed.
... Recent studies have shown that social platforms change the practice of journalism in several ways, including publication criteria, writing style, and timeline for posting news (Lischka, 2018). These changes can lead to an erosion of traditional norms that are central to building trust among audiences, ultimately undermining the authority of journalism (Ross Arguedas et al., 2022). ...
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In this article, we chart the conflicting standards of fact-checking outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries that shifted their focus from holding politicians to account to acting as content moderators. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalog the pressures they face and their struggle with tasks that are increasingly different from the journalistic values underpinning the practice. We find that fact-checkers have to balance the number of checks across each side of the partisan divide, an exercise in “bothsidesism” to manage the expectations of partisan social media users; that they increasingly prioritize the checking of viral content; and that Meta’s third-party fact-checking program prevents them from holding local politicians to account. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for content moderation outside WEIRD countries.
... This relates to how, for the studied young adults, it was often difficult to distinguish who collects their data, and in particular, what the specific role of news media as data collectors is when contrasted with platform companies. Whereas content and platform confusions have previously been identified by other scholars (e.g., Ross Arguedas et al., 2022;Valaskivi, 2022), data confusion and the related concept of forced vulnerability are novel outcomes of our empirical analysis. These concepts emerged from our adopted perspective to study audience perceptions of news organisations' data collection, which to our best knowledge, is not previously considered in literature in contrast to the growing literature on journalists' perceptions and use of audience data (e.g., Lamot & Paulussen, 2020;Salonen et al., 2023;Tenor, 2023). ...
... The trinity of platformisation, datafication, and algorithmisation (Latzer, 2021) has led to a situation where much of the news consumption on platforms takes place incidentally, i.e., news consumption is a by-product of consuming other content online (Boczkowski et al., 2018). Incidental news consumption has been theorised to lead (young) audiences to disassociate between the sources of information from their journalistic origin (Hasala et al., 2023;Ross Arguedas et al., 2022), and cause difficulties in identifying different content genres, and the motives behind producing them (Valaskivi, 2022). Empirical studies on audiences (e.g., Bergström & Jervelycke Belfrage, 2018;Swart et al., 2017) confirm that the boundaries people draw between news and other content on social media platforms are blurred and shifting. ...
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News media trust, and the lack thereof, has been a prominent topic of discussion among journalism scholars in recent years. In this article, we study young adults’ trust in news media from the perspectives of platformisation and datafication. For the empirical study, we collected interview data from 23 Finnish 19–25-year-old young adults and analysed it inductively with applied thematic analysis. Our analysis reveals that trust negotiation is relational and entails not accepted, but forced vulnerability in relation to news media and the platforms on which they operate. Unclarity about the agency of news media on social media platforms causes young adults to experience powerlessness and anxiety in the face of data collection, which in practice translates into indifference toward their data being used by both news media and social media platforms. We show that young adults face a variety of challenges when navigating the online (news) media environment, which as we identify, can result in three trust-diminishing confusions about content, platforms, and data. This may have profound effects on how journalism is viewed as a cornerstone of a democratic society.
... A recent Pew survey found that a majority of U.S. journalists (67%) said social media has a negative impact on the state of journalism, while only 18% said a positive impact (Gottfried et al. 2022). Interviews with journalists also highlight concerns that social media have precipitated a legitimacy crisis by harming trust in journalism and enabling mis-and disinformation (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). Leaders of news organizations are frustrated by the power asymmetries that characterize the relationships between platform companies and the news media (Nielsen and Ganter 2022). ...
... Against the backdrop of platformization and concomitant epistemological challenges for news, it remains an open question as to how journalists themselves articulate these challenges to their field. A number of recent studies have approached this question from different angles, typically using in-depth interviews to surface the discourses that journalists draw on to make sense of their own and their organizations' relationship to social media platforms (e.g., Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). ...
... Empirical studies suggest that journalists' narratives about the role of social media in their field are largely negative, at least within specific domains. Ross Arguedas et al. (2022) talked with journalists about the role of social media in shaping news trust. Their interviews-conducted across four countries-identified negative discourses about social media and trust both in the context of how journalism is made and how journalism is consumed, as well as the relationships between journalists and audiences. ...
... Journalists are required to gain the trust of sources and audiences, while judging the trustworthiness of others on a daily basis (Aharoni and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2019; Barnoy and Reich 2020). In digital mediascapes particularly, journalists manage their trust not only in human actors, but also in the platforms through which they engage with audiences (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022;Zahay et al. 2021). Second, the manifestations of both trust and distrust in journalism are multifaceted, as journalists are paradoxically required to have faith in their information sources (Barnoy and Reich 2020;Wintterlin 2020), yet to remain skeptical toward them (Davies 2008;Gonen, Kampf, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2020). ...
... Lastly, as a social institution, journalism plays a significant role in shaping public trust. Journalistic expressions of cynicism might decrease audiences' trust not only in politics (Hanitzsch et al. 2019), but, potentially, also in the news media itself (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). ...
... Despite this prevalence of trustworthiness in journalists' work, and in a stark contrast to the extensive attention trust has attracted within audience research (Karlsson and Clerwall 2019;Strömbäck et al. 2020), journalists' own trust-related attitudes and practices are seldom examined (Gonen, Kampf, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2020;Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). This deficiency might be related to the inclination of journalism studies to dismiss the notion of trust as overly simplistic and to theorize the credibility perceptions of news as merely an "audience issue" (Usher 2018, 565). ...
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This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.
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Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends in different countries. More specifically, trust has declined more in media environments that have become less structured by television news use, and increasingly structured by social media news use. Our findings underscore how changing structures of media use may be central to explaining trust dynamics in recent years, which suggests new avenues for restoring trust where it has eroded.