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Black Lives Matter Coverage: How Protest News Frames and Attitudinal Change Affect Social Media Engagement
Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between digital news coverage of protests and the audience’s willingness to engage with a story about Black Lives Matter on social media. Using a 3x2 experiment, we evaluate if news frames from the protest paradigm literature (riot, confrontation, and legitimizing) and the presence of an accompanying visual would make people more likely to read, like, share and comment on a news story about a street demonstration on social media. We also tested if news portrayal of protests might influence people’s level of support for the movement, which in turn could lead to different types of social media engagement outcomes. Results show that only the presence of visuals has a direct impact on willingness to share a story, with frames having a limited influence on behaviour if compared to other pre-existing attitudes about the police and protesters. However, we also found that the relationship between frames and social media engagement is mediated by a change in these attitudes and increased support for the movement. These findings suggest that engagement outcomes with digital news coverage are contingent on people’s support for the movement portrayed, although legitimizing coverage can influence those attitudes and shape social media behaviour in return.
... We analyze the news coverage of this specific social movement for two reasons. First, the BLM movement gained a considerable amount of media attention that "delegitimized and racialized the movement by accentuating conflict and violence" [22], which aligns with an established line of research that stresses that media coverage often focuses on violent and disruptive aspects of a movement's protest rather than its goals and social criticism [22][23][24][25]. Since public opinion and support of a social movement depend highly on how that movement is portrayed in news reporting [26][27][28], especially when violence is involved [23], it is particularly interesting to analyze the news portrayal of the BLM movement, as both protestors and police have committed acts of violence [29]. ...
... We analyze the news coverage of this specific social movement for two reasons. First, the BLM movement gained a considerable amount of media attention that "delegitimized and racialized the movement by accentuating conflict and violence" [22], which aligns with an established line of research that stresses that media coverage often focuses on violent and disruptive aspects of a movement's protest rather than its goals and social criticism [22][23][24][25]. Since public opinion and support of a social movement depend highly on how that movement is portrayed in news reporting [26][27][28], especially when violence is involved [23], it is particularly interesting to analyze the news portrayal of the BLM movement, as both protestors and police have committed acts of violence [29]. ...
... Reporting about violence is a specific type of negative news coverage [48]. Social movements, in particular, have been subjected to this type of negative news coverage [e.g., 49,50] "emphasizing violence and deviant behaviour" [22], which tends to increase the audience size as it "contributes to the media spectacle . . . around protest events" [16]. ...
Portrayals of violence are common in contemporary media reporting; they attract public attention and influence the reader's opinion. In the particular context of a social movement such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the portrayal of violence in news coverage attracts public attention and can affect the movement's development, support, and public perception. Research on the relationship between digital news content featuring violence and user attention on social media has been scarce. This paper analyzes the relationship between violence in online reporting on BLM and its effect on user attention on the social media platform Reddit. The analysis focuses on the portrayal of violence in images used in BLM-related digital news coverage shared on Reddit. The dataset is comprised of 5,873 news articles with images. The classification of violent images is based on a VGG19 convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a comprehensive dataset. The results suggest that what significantly affects user attention in digital news content is not the display of violence in images; rather, it is negative article titles, the news outlet's political leanings and level of factual reporting, and platform affordances that significantly affect user attention. Thus, this paper adds to the understanding of user attention distributions online and paves the way for future research in this field.
... Social media's propensity to encourage highly emotional communication can result in "emotional contagion" (Ferrara and Yang, 2015). The emotional attachment in social media communications can disrupt narratives that have so far been dominant and affect consumer attitudes and behavior, whereby a tipping point might be reached that necessitates organizational change (Baker and Rowe, 2013;Lim et al., 2015;Mourão and Brown, 2022). Of course, the emotional attachment can also be harnessed for change by political entrepreneurs (Duncombe, 2019). ...
Introduction: Mega sporting events, such as the Olympic Games, provide niche sports with unique opportunities to attract public attention. However, scandals during these events can pose serious threats to these sports. In particular, if a sport scandal enables hostile stakeholders to achieve a scale shift, it becomes almost impossible for a niche sport organization to manage the scandal.
Methods: The article employs a comparative research design that examines the trajectory of two scandals related to the German Olympic team that differ with regard to the occurrence of a scale shift. The first scandal involved a racist slur made by a German official during a cycling event; the second scandal was a case of animal cruelty during the modern pentathlon's equestrian event. Research relies on a mix of qualitative document analyses and quantitative analyses of the German Twitter discourse on both scandals. The analyses focus on the vulnerability to scandals, the potential for contentious politics, the scandal triggering events, the crisis communication, the reception, and the outcomes of both scandals.
Results and discussion: Our results show the detrimental impact of a scale shift on niche sports. The animal cruelty scandal put the future of the modern pentathlon at the Olympics at risk and triggered far-reaching reforms. The case supports the idea that a scale shift becomes more likely if there exists an effective collective action frame. In contrast, the German sports organizations effectively ended the racist slur scandal by imposing a limited sanction on the offender.
... Among many others, the hashtag #BlackLi-veMatter. [1], was used twelve million times and originated from the protests over the murder by a Minneapolis policeman of George Floyd, a man of African descent. The hashtag transformed dispersed initiatives into an organized movement through the social network. ...
We disclose a methodology to determine the participants in discussions and their contributions in social networks with a local relationship (e.g., nationality), providing certain levels of trust and efficiency in the process. The dynamic is a challenge that has demanded studies and some approximations to recent solutions. The study addressed the problem of identifying the nationality of users in the Twitter social network before an opinion request (of a political nature and social participation). The employed methodology classifies, via machine learning, the Twitter users' nationality to carry out opinion studies in three Central American countries. The Random Forests algorithm is used to generate classification models with small training samples, using exclusively numerical characteristics based on the number of times that different interactions among users occur. When averaging the proportions achieved by inferences of the ratio of nationals of each country, in the initial data, an average of 77.40% was calculated, compared to 91.60% averaged after applying the automatic classification model, an average increase of 14.20%. In conclusion, it can be seen that the suggested set of method provides a reasonable approach and efficiency in the face of opinion problems.
... ~ 2 h and 27 min average daily; DataReportal, 2021;Heffer et al., 2019;Zhong, Huang & Liu, 2020;Nguyen, 2021). Furthermore, social media is increasingly involved in various domains of life including education, economics and even politics, to the point where engagement with the economy and wider society almost necessitates its use, driving the continued proliferation of social media use (Calderaro, 2018;Nguyen, 2021;Mabić et al., 2020;Mourão & Kilgo, 2021). This societal shift towards increased social media use has had some positive benefits, serving to facilitate the creation and maintenance of social groups, increase access to opportunities for career advancement and created wide ranging and accessible education options for many users (Calderaro, 2018;Prinstein et al., 2020;Bouchillon, 2020;Nguyen, 2021). ...
Introduction:
Social media use has become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Simultaneously, concerns surrounding social media abuse/problematic use, which resembles behavioural and substance addictions, have proliferated. This has prompted the introduction of 'Social Media Addiction' [SMA], as a condition requiring clarifications regarding its definition, assessment and associations with other addictions. Thus, this study aimed to: (a) advance knowledge on the typology/structure of SMA symptoms experienced and: (b) explore the association of these typologies with addictive behaviours related to gaming, gambling, alcohol, smoking, drug abuse, sex (including porn), shopping, internet use, and exercise.
Methods:
A sample of 968 [Mage = 29.5, SDage = 9.36, nmales = 622 (64.3 %), nfemales = 315, (32.5 %)] adults was surveyed regarding their SMA experiences, using the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS). Their experiences of Gaming, Internet, Gambling, Alcohol, Cigarette, Drug, Sex, Shopping and Exercise addictions were additionally assessed, and latent profile analysis (LPA) was implemented.
Results:
Three distinct profiles were revealed, based on the severity of one's SMA symptoms: 'low', 'moderate' and 'high' risk. Subsequent ANOVA analyses suggested that participants classified as 'high' risk indicated significantly higher behaviours related to internet, gambling, gaming, sex and in particular shopping addictions.
Conclusions:
Results support SMA as a unitary construct, while they potentially challenge the distinction between technological and behavioural addictions. Findings also imply that the assessment of those presenting with SMA behaviours, as well as prevention and intervention targeting SMA at risk groups, should consider other comorbid addictions.
... Among many others, the hashtag #BlackLiveMatter. [1], was used twelve million times and originated from the protests over the murder by a Minneapolis policeman of George Floyd, a man of African descent. The hashtag transformed dispersed initiatives into an organized movement through the social network. ...
We disclose a methodology to determine the participants in discussions and their contributions in social networks with a local relationship (e.g., nationality), providing certain levels of trust and efficiency in the process. The dynamic is a challenge that has demanded studies and some approximations to recent solutions. The study addressed the problem of identifying the nationality of users in the Twitter social network before an opinion request (of a political nature and social participation). The employed methodology classifies, via machine learning, the Twitter users' nationality to carry out opinion studies in three Central American countries. The Random Forests algorithm is used to generate classification models with small training samples, using exclusively numerical characteristics based on the number of times that different interactions among users occur. When averaging the proportions achieved by inferences of the ratio of nationals of each country, in the initial data, an average of 77.40% was calculated, compared to 91.60% averaged after applying the automatic classification model, an average increase of 14.20%. In conclusion, it can be seen that the suggested set of method provides a reasonable approach and efficiency in the face of opinion problems.
... Studying the topic of climate change thus provides an excellent opportunity to examine not only how GPT-3 responds to this group compared to the opinion majority, but also whether there might be social learning and attitudinal changes after the chat. The second topic represents a heated social issue, which has raised continuous attention from the media and public in the recent decade (58). ...
Autoregressive language models, which use deep learning to produce human-like texts, have become increasingly widespread. Such models are powering popular virtual assistants in areas like smart health, finance, and autonomous driving. While the parameters of these large language models are improving, concerns persist that these models might not work equally for all subgroups in society. Despite growing discussions of AI fairness across disciplines, there lacks systemic metrics to assess what equity means in dialogue systems and how to engage different populations in the assessment loop. Grounded in theories of deliberative democracy and science and technology studies, this paper proposes an analytical framework for unpacking the meaning of equity in human-AI dialogues. Using this framework, we conducted an auditing study to examine how GPT-3 responded to different sub-populations on crucial science and social topics: climate change and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Our corpus consists of over 20,000 rounds of dialogues between GPT-3 and 3290 individuals who vary in gender, race and ethnicity, education level, English as a first language, and opinions toward the issues. We found a substantively worse user experience with GPT-3 among the opinion and the education minority subpopulations; however, these two groups achieved the largest knowledge gain, changing attitudes toward supporting BLM and climate change efforts after the chat. We traced these user experience divides to conversational differences and found that GPT-3 used more negative expressions when it responded to the education and opinion minority groups, compared to its responses to the majority groups. We discuss the implications of our findings for a deliberative conversational AI system that centralizes diversity, equity, and inclusion.
... Studies in media studies argue that social media platforms have been able to influence the behaviour traits of protests among people and that these protests can cause social and political changes (Valenzuela et al. 2012;Bekmagambetov et al. 2018; Mourão and Brown, 2022). A study conducted by Sinpeng (2021) on social media hashtag (#) activism in Thailand by youths was focused on the displeasure of youths with the Thai government and their demand for working democracy. ...
The 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria gained global attention. The protests drawn thousands of youths to the streets in a wave of rolling fury that built into one of the largest demonstrations for years in the country. Unlike previous protests in the country, the 2020 year's protests played out across social networks in a buildup of videos, images, and stories on Twitter Facebook, and other platforms displaying pictures and footage from the streets. This study employed the Social Network Theory in identifying the influence of social media as a strategy for protest movements and for the diffusion of information about #EndSARS and the sustenance of this movement over a long period, despite forces that have tried to silence it. This study argued that the sustenance of protests such as #EndSARS over a long period was dependent on factors such as: (i) that some individuals were more resistant to being influenced than others; (ii) that some individuals tended to be more responsive than others; and (iii) that some individuals seemed to be more affected than others (and were, therefore, more likely to pass the information on to others). The findings revealed that protesters used emotional dynamics, collective identities, symbolic artifacts, and mutual values to sustain protests if their demands were not met on time.
... Studies concerning racism in American journalism have been done to see the issue differently. Mourão & Kilgo (2021) conducted a study entitled "Black Lives Matter Coverage: How Protest News Frames and Attitudinal Change Affect Social Media Engagement". It results in a fresh perspective of news coverage affecting social media engagement during the BLM protest. ...
The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspects of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions’ negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters’ resistance. It is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue. The rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer immediate attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has emerged through the help of social media and citizen journalism in spreading the news, responding to the incident, and mobilizing the protest against police brutality and racial discrimination against African Americans. Citizen journalism has become an alternative for Twitter users who distrust American journalism from mainstream news media. This study examined tweets of citizen journalism to see the discourse of American journalism on Twitter. Using Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds positive and negative aspectse of citizen journalism. The first is that citizen journalism is an online resistance tool of protesters against news institutions where they can voice their opinions and deny news institutions' negative portrayal. The second, citizen journalism, is a tool for news institutions in responding to the protesters' resistance. This is because protesters lack a solid and consistent perception of the issue, and the rejection of news institutions and journalists is no longer primary attention for them as soon as police officers attack news crews.
A US experiment ( n = 1506) demonstrated how a new approach to writing protest stories challenges press patterns in the United States of underrepresented groups. News stories that explain the goals and background of a protest—a concept called legitimizing—and that humanize—rather than criminalize—a person whose death sparked a protest led news audiences to better understand the protest and those involved in the social movement. We also found that those with conservative political beliefs perceived these stories as less credible than those written following journalistic norms typical in the United States that tend to cast protesters and their causes in a negative light, although the opposite was true for those with liberal views. Results are discussed in relation to the protest paradigm.
Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations of power to meaningfully evaluate the democratic consequences of polarization. Groups struggling for equality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, often cause polarization because they threaten the extant power and status of dominant groups. To develop a shared theoretical lens around polarization and its relationship with inequality, we take up the case of research on the role of platforms in polarization, showing how scholarship routinely lacks analysis of inequality.
The spread of Covid-19 cases in Indonesia has caused a weakening of economic activity, which also impacts economic growth, unemployment, and a decline in income from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). This study aims to explore the role of the creative economy through virtual philanthropy based on Islamic teachings in helping economic recovery. The type used in this research is qualitative with a phenomenological approach. The data collection technique was primarily done through observation and interviews to strengthen the data. The participants in this study were four communities of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) engaged in services and one district of empowerment in the region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as the subject of research. The results of this study indicate that the presence of a virtual philanthropic community based on Islamic guidelines through social media has an impact on business growth in six essential ways, namely: the movement to buy friends' products, group alms, promote friends' products, buy in cash, usury-free capital assistance, and strengthen networks business. The hope is that this Islamic-based virtual philanthropy can become a driving force of empowerment for small communities.
This chapter examines social media and critical security studies in tandem with examining questions about identity. Identity was highlighted as a key area that required attention in the post-Cold War area as identity-based conflicts emerged onto the political scene. However, since then identity concerns have mushroomed and social media has become a key area where they are discussed, contested and subvert, such as with the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. This chapter examines these questions through the prism of two specifically security-related examples. The first example examines the #JeSuisAhmed hashtag and specifically how within it French national identity and its relationship to Muslims is contested on social media. As such, Ahmed dying as a responder to the Charlie Hebdo shooting was covered on social media as an example of Muslims laying down their lives for the values of the French republic, and that Muslims died in the service of France as a defender of the free speech values. The second example examines that security debates become internationalised on social media, interconnected with discussions of Muslim identity and its broader place in the global context. The two examples, Twitter responses to the Grenfell tower fire and the Manchester Arena bombing, also demonstrate that at any given time, users can become “security elites” within particular debates, but in fleeting and ephemeral ways.
This chapter introduces the key debates about critical security studies and social media that will frame the discussions in the rest of this book. Key in this is challenging simplistic and unidirectional assumptions about social media and its role in the sphere of politics and security. To do this, this introduction sets out three key assumptions that underpin the rest of this book. The first takes up the call within critical security studies to shatter disciplinary boundaries when we examine security in the unregulated space of social media. Secondly, related to this expansion of disciplines, scholars need to “expect the unexpected” when examining security on social media as the range of idioms, symbols, narratives and ideas used to re-frame, subvert and contest security on social media is breath-taking. Thirdly, scholars also need to be aware of the fickle nature of social media, and the constantly changeable nature of platforms, data sources and locations of security on social media which requires significant and ongoing methods and methodological innovations. Fourthly, the emancipatory burden of critical theory, and by extension critical security studies, weighs heavily also on broader discussions of social media’s political potential. The results are extremely mixed, with social media being enmeshed in relations of control, commodification and emancipation. This book argues that social media offers only a “thin” form of discursive emancipation, where it gives previously unheard voices a platform, but the potential of this to change power relations in the “real world” are unclear.
Purpose
On November 19, 2020, a man was brutally murdered by security guards of a supermarket chain located in a city in the very south of Brazil, home to the world’s largest Afro-Black community outside Africa. This killing triggered protests across the country, as a Black man was killed one day before Black Awareness Day. This large popular mobilization happened at the end of 2020 and resembled the George Floyd protests. Despite the anger resonating across communities in Brazil and abroad, the news media coverage on social media resulted in an inequitable distribution of editorial space to both the affective and critical dimensions. As users often adopt view-based practices by not clicking on social media content shared through URLs, it is essential to understand how news media portrays content in short text posted online.
Study design
Under the lens of news frame and social media theories, our study was built on a multi-method approach combining computational, quantitative, qualitative methods to understand how news media portrays content in a tweet. To do so, we collected 267,576 tweets. They were filtered through the case’s perspective and analyzed using frame theory.
Findings
Results show that Brazilian news media value different angles concerning Mr. Freitas’s death and subsequent events. While traditional media tends to be more neutral in portraying protests and the killing, digital media raised the debate on the issue and about racism in the country, highlighting protests and using supporting hashtags. Furthermore, cultural hybridity can be seen in Brazil with Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
Practical and social implications
In a media system that shares some aspects with those found in the United States, such as highly commercial media, our study demonstrates the importance of digital media for articulating racial issues and segregation in Brazil.
Originality/value
A long tradition of scholarship in sociology and communication studies has investigated how news media frames social movements and the impact this coverage might have on protesters and their ability to gather public support in Western-rich democracies. Less well documented is the use of news frames in Brazil. Furthermore, it shows how BLM is hybridized with local topics and has gained traction with digital media outlets. This study aims to fill this gap by becoming the first study investigating how news media frames social movements against racism in Brazil.
This study employed a 2 × 3 × 2 experiment in the United States to understand how headlines trigger willingness to verify information, manipulating partisan leaning, source credibility, and factuality. Based on evolutionary psychology, we also explored how perceived importance and information familiarity influence willingness to verify information for accuracy or confirmation of preexisting beliefs. Findings show no differences between accuracy (truth-seeking) and confirmation motivations, both driven mainly by importance. Conservatives report less intent to verify for both motivations and rely more strongly on authority cues (source credibility), while liberals rely on prior familiarity with content. Implications for news literacy efforts are discussed.
This study assesses the relationship between two well-established sets of frames to better understand the news coverage of massive political protests. By relying on Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic frames and McLeod and Hertog’s protest frames, this study aims to identify whether certain generic frames emphasized in news stories increase the tendency to delegitimize protest movements. To this end, we analyzed the news coverage of Chile’s Estallido Social, a series of massive political demonstrations that developed across the country from October to December 2019. Data for this study come from stories published by Radio Bío Bío, the most trusted news outlet in the country, according to Reuters Institute. By analyzing a sample of 417 stories, we found the coverage replicated patterns that usually delegitimize protest movements, as many of the stories focused on violent acts and depicted demonstrators as deviant from the status quo. We also found a direct relationship between generic frames and protest frames, in which the presence of the former determines that of the latter. Generic frames provide information about how the news media interpret and package the news, which in turn affects demonstration-related features that the news media pay attention to. As such, we argue that combining both generic and issue-specific frames is a helpful approach to understanding the complexities of protest news coverage.
A constellation of journalistic tools, platforms, companies and nonprofit funding has recently emerged, promoting the idea that allowing the audience to contribute to the news agenda is a promising strategy to increase trust in journalism, create new revenue streams and foster community-building. Despite a growing body of research, however, two main issues remain currently unexplored: (1) the extent to which engaged journalism as a practice aligns with engaged journalism as a theoretical construct, and (2) the extent to which the audience assumptions underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism align with actual audience expectations and desires. This paper begins to address both of these issues by comparing how advocates of engaged journalism conceptualize the public’s interest in participating in journalism with observations of actual instances of that participation. We find that there is indeed a gap between engaged journalism theory and practice, which we attribute to a distinction between what engaged journalists believe audiences want from news and how those audiences actually behave. At the same time, we also find that institutional rigidity in newsrooms that leads to some reluctance with regard to making news production more collaborative.
Previous research suggests that mainstream media coverage around the world follows a “protest paradigm” that demonizes protesters and marginalizes their causes. Given the recent increase in global protest activity and the growing importance of social media for activism, this paper content analyzes 1,438 protest-related English and Spanish news stories from around the world that were shared on social media, examining framing, sourcing, and marginalizing devices across media outlet type, region, language, and social media platform in order to create a typology of how the protest paradigm operates in an international and social media context. Results showed type of protest, location of protest, and type of media outlet were significantly related to whether news stories adhered to the protest paradigm. Social media shares were predicted by region of media outlet, English-language media, and type of protest.
As news organizations struggle to overcome losses in revenue and relevance, academics and professionals have pinned their hopes for salvation on increasing ‘audience engagement’. Yet few agree on what audience engagement means, why it will make journalism more successful, or what ‘success’ in journalism should even look like. This article uses Williams and Delli Carpini’s ‘media regimes’ as a theoretical framework to argue that studying the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding it – is vital to understanding journalism’s transition from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is yet to fully emerge. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It concludes with a call for more research into audience engagement efforts to better understand what journalism is and what it might become.
Literature on intergroup conflict and identity is well established; this literature includes work on competitive victimhood—the process by which groups attempt to establish that they have suffered more than opposing groups (Noor et al., Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012, 16(4), 351–374) to restore feelings of moral identity, or cache often for use in a political context (Sullivan et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, 102(4), 778). Within prior work on competitive victimhood, models of reconciliation based on the particular needs and identities established within the competitive victimhood dynamic have also been posited (SimanTov‐Nachlieli et al., European Journal of Social Psychology, 2015, 45(2), 139–145; Shnabel et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013, 49(5), 867–877). While competitive victimhood theory has been applied in prior work to several cross‐national settings, there exist other important areas of intergroup tension that have not been explored. We propose that the concept of competitive victimhood can be fruitfully used to understand movement‐countermovement dynamics, including those related to conflictual race relations in the United States. Specifically, this article will examine the dynamic between the movements “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” as a salient paired research case of a movement and countermovement for investigating identity and victimhood. In our present article, we map the discourse of the Black and Blue Lives Matter movements as illustrations of collective victimhood (Schori‐Eyal et al., Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2014, 44(12), 778–794) and competitive victimhood (Noor et al., Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012, 16(4), 351–374). We find that while both movements demonstrate competitive victimhood, they are also qualitatively different. Due to differences in threat, power, and history of those the movements advocate for, each movement demonstrates different needs (Burton, Conflict: Human needs theory, Springer, 1990). We posit that the identity dynamics of competitive victimhood within social movements specifically lead to important and different identity needs for agency and morality (Shnabel & Noor, in Restoring civil societies: The psychology of intervention and engagement following crisis (pp. 192–207), Wiley‐Blackwell, Chichester, England, 2012). We examine what these differences would mean in these particular movements, as well as for potential avenues of community building based on addressing these needs. In all cases, we aim to show that what has largely been considered a criminal justice phenomenon in the United States is fundamentally political, with roots and possible solutions in intergroup identity dynamics that can be fruitfully explored within political psychology.
In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.
This research investigates how personality strength, news engagement, and news consumption influence engagement on Reddit, an environment that affords varying degrees of anonymity and is known to paradoxically host toxic and supportive communities. Using a survey of Redditors, findings suggest women are less likely to comment and post but are equally likely to vote and read posts as men, indicating there may be hesitation to engage in using more active participatory options within the site. Older users are more likely to comment and post when compared to younger users.
The rise of the modern Black Lives Matter movement can be traced back to two key events, the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin and the 2014 death of Michael Brown. Research routinely showed that mainstream media’s narrative choices marginalize and delegitimize protesters and their causes, a pattern known as the protest paradigm. This study provides a longitudinal examination of how the same mainstream media system varied in their coverage of similar events and the degree to which journalists challenged the predicted paradigms conceptualized in other academic work. A content analysis of national newspaper coverage revealed that news before the judicial rulings focused on protesters’ tactics (violence versus peaceful) and changed to the realm of ideas (grievances and demands) after the assailants were considered not guilty of wrongdoing. No progression was found in legitimizing coverage of protests between the two cases.
The shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in August 2014 served as a pivotal case that pushed excessive use of police force against minority groups to the national spotlight. Guided by the scholarship on protest coverage, this article investigates the interplay between advocacy and journalistic framing in the coverage of the Ferguson protests by national and local news. A content analysis of five newspapers during the first cycle of protests identified how journalistic frames of presentation derived from the ‘protest paradigm’ literature related to the content frames pushed forward by the Black Lives Matter movement. Results reveal that initial stories were predominantly episodic and focused on violence to the detriment of demands and grievances. However, episodic stories were also critical of the police response and the use of military-grade weapons to contain the demonstrations. As the weeks progressed, journalists gave space to the ideas of protestors in a more thematic way, especially on issues related to race beyond the topic of police brutality. Taken together, findings suggest small but significant progress as time continued during the first month of demonstrations after Brown’s shooting. Results presented here challenge the paradigmatic nature of protest coverage but reinforce that more space should be given to contextual narratives behind social movements’ actions in addition to coverage that is critical of police and protestor tactics.
This article relies on U.S. 2-wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social media for social interaction in fostering political expression and participation processes. Results indicate that social media news use has direct effects on offline political participation and indirect effects on offline and online political participation mediated via political expression. Furthermore, social media use for social interaction does not have direct influence in people's political engagement, but rather an indirect effect by means of citizens expressing themselves politically.
In recent years, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 tools has opened new possibilities for audience participation in news, while “engagement” has become a media industry buzzword. In this study, we explore approaches to engagement emerging in the field based on in-depth interviews with editors at a range of news outlets from several countries, and we map these approaches onto the literature on participatory journalism and related innovations in journalism practice. Our findings suggest variation in approaches to engagement that can be arrayed along several related dimensions, encompassing how news outlets measure and practice it (e.g. with the use of quantitative audience metrics methods), whether they think about audiences as more passive or more active users, the stages at which they incorporate audience data or input into the news product, and how skeptically or optimistically they view the audience. Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content. We identify technological, economic, professional, and organizational factors that shape and constrain how news outlets practice “engagement.”
We hypothesize that generic frames influence what news people share on Facebook and Twitter through three different routes: emotions, motivations, and psychological engagement. Using a mixed-methods design, a content analysis of a representative sample of articles published in six Chilean outlets was combined with in-depth interviews with digital journalists. After controlling for issue, newsworthiness, informational utility, valence, and other confounds, results show that—across platforms—a morality frame increases news sharing, whereas a conflict frame decreases it. Emphasizing economic consequences also decreases sharing, but only on Facebook. Surprisingly, the human interest angle has no noticeable effects. These results show that news frames can have behavioral consequences, and confirm the existence of a gap between preferred frames of journalists and users.
This study extends past research on the relationship between news use and participation by examining how youth combine news exposure across an array of media devices, sources, and services. Results from a national survey of U.S. youth ages 12 to 17 reveal four distinct news repertoires. We find that half of youth respondents are news avoiders who exhibit the lowest levels of participation. The other half of youth respondents are characterized by one of three patterns of news use, each distinct in how they seek out (or avoid) using new media platforms and sources for news, and in their levels of participation.
The well-known phrase 'if it bleeds, it leads' describes the sensational approach that has penetrated the history of news. Sensationalism is a term without complete consensus among scholars, and its meaning and implications have not been considered in a digital environment. This study analyzes 400 articles from online-native news organizations across the Americas, evaluating the sensational treatment of news categories and news values, and their associated social media interaction numbers on Facebook and Twitter. Findings suggest that 'hard' news topics like government affairs and science/ technology were treated sensationally just as often as traditionally sensationalized categories like crime or lifestyle and society. In addition, audiences are not necessarily
This article demonstrates the ways in which youth of color played an active role in debates that erupted on Twitter following the tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014. These debates on social media represent a larger struggle over discourse on race and racism across the nation. Drawing from critical theory and race theory, and engaging in the relatively new practice of using Twitter as a source of data for sociological analysis, this article examines Twitter as an emerging public sphere and studies the hashtags “#AllLivesMatter” and “#BlackLivesMatter” as contested signs that represent dominant ideologies. This article consists of a qualitative textual analysis of a selection of Twitter posts from December 3 to 7, 2014, following the nonindictments of officers in the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The debates on Twitter reveal various strategies that youth of color employed to shape the national discourse about race in the wake of these high-profile tragedies.
This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The Indian media emerge as the least likely to follow the protest paradigm, while Brazilian and Chinese media conform to it in moderate levels. Comparative analysis suggests the historical legitimacy of informal power negotiations in a political culture makes news media more willing to take protesters seriously and limits adherence to the protest paradigm. In contrast, a news organization’s ideological affiliation with the government of the day, rather than any ideology per se, makes it relatively more likely to conform to the protest paradigm. Marginalization devices such as circus, appearance, and eyewitness accounts are rarely used in any of these nations. But disparity of sources, (non)reference to protesters’ causes and violence, and violence blame appear to be abiding features of news coverage of protests everywhere.
This article provides a review of scientific, peer-reviewed articles that examine the relationship between news sharing and social media in the period from 2004 to 2014. A total of 461 articles were obtained following a literature search in two databases (Communication & Mass Media Complete [CMMC] and ACM), out of which 109 were deemed relevant based on the study’s inclusion criteria. In order to identify general tendencies and to uncover nuanced findings, news sharing research was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Three central areas of research—news sharing users, content, and networks—were identified and systematically reviewed. In the central concluding section, the results of the review are used to provide a critical diagnosis of current research and suggestions on how to move forward in news sharing research.
Scholars have observed the influence of online and offline media use on the promotion of political and civic engagement. Findings indicate a positive correlation between media use and participation. This study moves beyond such effect on participation. Using data from an original national US survey, this article explores the effects of News Platform Preference Scale – a construct that measures the contrast between online and traditional news use in a continuum – on participatory behaviours. Controlling for usual online and offline media use, results show that a preference for digital media has strong positive effects over political and civic participation, suggesting these media may indeed be different.
Protest activity has become a central means for political change in Chile. We examine the association between social media use and youth protest, as well as mediating and moderating mechanisms of this relationship, using survey data collected in Chile in 2010. We found that Facebook use was associated significantly with protest activity, even after taking into account political grievances, material and psychological resources, values, and news media use. The link between overall Facebook use and protest activity was explained by using the social network for news and socializing rather than when it was used for self-expression. Postmaterialist values and political ideologies were not found to moderate the association between Facebook use and protest.
This article relies on U.S. 2-wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social media for social interaction in fostering political expression and participation processes. Results indicate that social media news use has direct effects on offline political participation and indirect effects on offline and online political participation mediated via political expression. Furthermore, social media use for social interaction does not have direct influence in people's political engagement, but rather an indirect effect by means of citizens expressing themselves politically.
Recently, scholars tested how digital media use for informational purposes similarly contributes to foster democratic processes and the creation of social capital. Nevertheless, in the context of today's socially-networked-society and the rise of social media applications (i.e., Facebook) new perspectives need to be considered. Based on U.S. national data, results show that after controlling for demographic variables, traditional media use offline and online, political constructs (knowledge and efficacy), and frequency and size of political discussion networks, seeking information via social network sites is a positive and significant predictor of people's social capital and civic and political participatory behaviors, online and offline.
This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey of 1600 Canadians. News organizations are rushing into social media, viewing services like Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to market and distribute content. There has been limited research outside the United States into the effects of social media on news consumption. Our study found that social networks are becoming a significant source of news for Canadians. Two-fifths of social networking users said they receive news from people they follow on services like Facebook, while a fifth get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow. Users said they valued social media because it helped them keep up with events and exposed them to a wider range of news and information. While social interaction has always affected the dissemination of news, our study contributes to research that suggests social media are becoming central to the way people experience news. Networked media technologies are extending the ability of users to create and receive personalized news streams. Investigating how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows would contribute to our understanding of the evolving relationship between the journalist and the audience.
This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the concept of engagement.
This research examines the key characteristics of hyperpartisan news pages on Facebook and how audiences interact with politically polarized content through the visual-emotional shorthand of Facebook Reactions. Through a quantitative content analysis of 4,236 posts shared by the most popular hyperpartisan U.S. Facebook pages before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, the researchers introduce the concept of affective affordances to analyse emotional reactions elicited through Facebook Reactions in response to right- and left-leaning Facebook news posts, as well as the political topics, rhetorical devices, stylistic devices and emotionally charged content that are most likely to elicit emotional responses and inspire shares and comments from audiences in reaction to liberal and conservative content. The results are interpreted in light of the theory of affective intelligence.
This study tests the impact of protest news frames on audience support for a civil rights movement. Using a 3 x 2 experimental design, we explored how frames and visuals affect audiences’ criticism of police and protesters, support for, and identification with the movement. Findings show that articles with a legitimizing debate frame increase support for protesters, identification with protesters, and police criticism compared to articles with riot and confrontation frames. Riot and confrontation frames increase criticism towards protesters, decrease support for and identification with the movement, and decrease police criticism. We also considered predispositions towards Black people, the police, and social movements in general as essential to understanding support. Results revealed prior levels of support for the movement influenced criticism of police action and support for and identification with protestors more than media frames. As such, we argue that preexisting attitudes about actors in a news story are essential variables to consider in protest coverage effects research.
We investigated how sharing performance on Facebook and Twitter is influenced both by news articles’ content characteristics and the availability of additional news articles reporting on the same news topic. We conducted a multi-method study, integrating automated data collection and manual/automated content analyses of 1,764 German online news articles. Our findings show the influence of news factors and, more importantly, news outlets on sharing performance, while simultaneously highlighting differences between the logics of news sharing on Facebook and Twitter. We also find that the first article reporting on a news event is shared more often than subsequent articles.
Previous research suggests that mainstream media coverage around the world follows a “protest paradigm” that demonizes protesters and marginalizes their causes. Given the recent increase in global protest activity and the growing importance of social media for activism, this paper content analyzes 1,438 protest-related English and Spanish news stories from around the world that were shared on social media, examining framing, sourcing, and marginalizing devices across media outlet type, region, language, and social media platform in order to create a typology of how the protest paradigm operates in an international and social media context. Results showed type of protest, location of protest, and type of media outlet were significantly related to whether news stories adhered to the protest paradigm. Social media shares were predicted by region of media outlet, English-language media, and type of protest.
This article argues for new approaches to the study of incidental exposure that better account for the role of algorithms, platforms, and processes of datafication in shaping the likelihood of news exposure online. It offers a critique of three themes prominent in the incidental exposure literature: (1) incidental exposure connotes accidental exposure to news on social media, (2) news content is ubiquitous on social media, and (3) incidental exposure can be conceptually distinguished from intentional exposure to news on social media. This article proposes a new metaphor to reframe research on incidental exposure: ‘attraction’ to news.
This study uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shape the way journalists cover left- and right-leaning protests on social media. Several studies have investigated how reporters portray social movements, finding that news marginalizes protestors by focusing on spectacle and violent tactics to the detriment of their ideas. In this study, we turn to journalists’ Twitter accounts to analyze if these patterns are transferred to social media, as predicted by the literature on normalization of new affordances. Through a mixed methodology matching survey and social media data from 466 Brazilian journalists who tweeted about protests in 2013 and 2015, results revealed individual attitudes predicted coverage, indicating that social media was a space for personal, not professional, expression. Contrary to the literature, findings show that social media portrayals were more legitimizing during the left-leaning demonstrations than during the right-leaning elite-driven one. As a result, marginalizing patterns of protest coverage were challenged, not replicated, on Twitter. These findings suggest a limitation of the theory of normalization to explain how global journalists use social media.
The visibility of news and politics in a Facebook newsfeed depends on the actions of a diverse set of actors: users, their friends, content publishers such as news organizations, advertisers, and algorithms. The focus of this paper is on untangling the role of this last actor from the others. We ask, how does Facebook algorithmically infer what users are interested in, and how do interest inferences shape news exposure? We weave together survey data and interest categorization data from participants’ Facebook accounts to audit the algorithmic interest classification system on Facebook. These data allow us to model the role of algorithmic inference in shaping content exposure. We show that algorithmic ‘sorting out’ of users has consequences for who is exposed to news and politics on Facebook. People who are algorithmically categorized as interested in news or politics are more likely to attract this kind of content into their feeds – above and beyond their self-reported interest in civic content.
News coverage is fundamental to a protest’s viability, but research suggests media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo (a pattern known as the protest paradigm). This study questions the validity of those claims within the context of digital newspaper coverage, interrogating how topic and region shape coverage. Using a content analysis of coverage from sixteen newspapers in various U.S. market types and regions, this research examines framing and sourcing features in articles about protests. Results suggest media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment. A model to understand news coverage of protest based on a hierarchy of social struggle is proposed.
By adopting the uses and gratifications approach to understand two evolutionary needs—the environmental surveillance need and social involvement need—this study investigated the use of alarm and prosocial words in news headlines and the associated generic digital footprints. We analyzed over 170,000 online news headlines and the number of associated clicks and “likes” for each news story on an online news platform. Our results support the idea of a human alarm system for sensational news as a psychological survival mechanism designed to detect and pay attention to threatening news such as catastrophes and diseases. News headlines with alarm words indirectly attracted more “likes,” indicating a concern with survival, through an increased number of clicks to select that news item. Furthermore, the results of a conditional indirect effect model showed that while online readers selectively clicked on news headlines with alarm words, the presence of a prosocial word in the headline increased the likelihood that readers would “like” it.
In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with leftist President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage delegitimizing social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess the extent to which the paradigm holds when protests take on a conservative elite-supported narrative contesting the government. Through a quantitatively-driven mixed methods approach combining content analysis and interviews with mainstream journalists, results revealed that when grievances evolved into coherent anti-government demands, official sources from opposition parties served to legitimize the movement. As such, this study departs from an understanding of protest coverage as paradigmatic towards a complex view of the relationship between protestors and the press. Findings show that when elite opposition groups support protests, journalistic norms and routines validate demonstrations.
This study compares U.S. digital news coverage of recent foreign and domestic protests. Differences in coverage’s framing, sourcing, and device emphases were analyzed for two cases: protests that erupted after the death of Michael Brown and protests demanding justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico. Building on protest paradigm literature, content analysis results show news articles that appeared on Facebook and Twitter emphasized legitimizing frames for foreign protests more than domestic protests. Foreign protests were framed with the spectacle frame more than domestic protests which were more often portrayed as confrontational. Digitally native news organizations produced content that deviated from expected paradigmatic norms the most. In addition, this research examines the relationship between content and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Implications of these findings within the theoretical framework of the protest paradigm are discussed.
Against conventional wisdom, pervasive black-white disparities pair with vitriolic public conversation in politically progressive communities throughout America. Networked News, Racial Divides examines obstacles to public dialogues about racial inequality and opportunities for better discourse in mid-sized, liberal cities. The book narrates the challenges faced when talking about race through a series of stories about each community struggling with K-12 education achievement gaps. Media expert Sue Robinson applies Bourdieusian field theory to understand media ecologies and analyze whose voices get heard and whose get left out. She explores how privilege shapes discourse and how identity politics can interfere with deliberation. Drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities, this reflexive and occasionally narrative book chronicles the institutional, cultural and other problematic realities to amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in seven US-based newspapers to determine whether the protest paradigm, “a pattern of news coverage that expresses disapproval toward protests and dissent,” and other marginalizing techniques are present, and racialized.
Design/methodology/approach
Relevant articles published during a six-month period of 2014 near the death of Michael Brown were retrieved from the selected outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the St Louis Post-Dispatch. Textual and content analyses were performed.
Findings
The articles heavily followed the paradigm. An additional characteristic, blame attribution, was also identified. Language of crime, lawlessness, violence, blame for nearby acts of violence, and inflammatory quotes from bystanders and official sources were often present. There was little discussion of key issues associated with the formation of BLM.
Research limitations/implications
Mainstream outlets rather than social media or alternative outlets were examined. Future research should study coverage of BLM in other outlets.
Practical implications
Measures to avoid marginalizing protests and racialization of coverage, including increased diversity in the newsroom and monitoring for racialized language are suggested.
Social implications
Racialization of news and coverage of BLM has widespread negative consequences, such as association of Blacks with criminality that may affect their quality of life. The protest paradigm has the ability to squelch participation in social movements, which have the possibility to bring about needed social change.
Originality/value
This interdisciplinary paper highlights the important role of mainstream media and news routines in affecting the BLM movement. It uses diversity research to make recommendations for media practitioners to avoid racialization of news.
The 2014 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC) received unprecedented attention by both news media and social media audiences. Using content analysis, this research examines how digital news utilized different news values and emotional appeals to cover the IBC. In addition, this work includes a secondary analysis that examines what coverage characteristics influenced social media audiences to share content on Facebook and Twitter. Results reveal that while celebrity participation and human interest stories were more likely to be covered, news values played a limited role in predicting audience sharing practices. Articles that use emotions in a story are more likely to entice sharing on Facebook than on Twitter.
In 2014 protests erupted around the world after 43 college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were kidnapped and massacred. This bilingual, cross-national content analysis explores the relationship between multimedia features in stories about the Ayotzinapa protests and how social media users liked, shared, and commented on that coverage. This study furthers our understanding of the protest paradigm in a digital context, and sheds light on differences in mainstream, alternative, and online media outlets' coverage of protesters. Additionally, this study suggests social media users might prefer more legitimizing coverage of protesters than mainstream media typically offer.
In 2014, a dedicated activist movement — Black Lives Matter (BLM) — ignited an urgent national conversation about police killings of unarmed Black citizens. Online tools have been anecdotally credited as critical in this effort, but researchers are only beginning to evaluate this claim. This research report examines the movement’s uses of online media in 2014 and 2015. To do so, we analyze three types of data: 40.8 million tweets, over 100,000 web links, and 40 interviews of BLM activists and allies. Most of the report is devoted to detailing our findings, which include:
*Although the #Blacklivesmatter hashtag was created in July 2013, it was rarely used through the summer of 2014 and did not come to signify a movement until the months after the Ferguson protests.
*Social media posts by activists were essential in spreading Michael Brown’s story nationally.
* Protesters and their supporters were generally able to circulate their own narratives on Twitter without relying on mainstream news outlets.
* There are six major communities that consistently discussed police brutality on Twitter in 2014 and 2015: Black Lives Matter, Anonymous/Bipartisan Report, Black Entertainers, Conservatives, Mainstream News, and Young Black Twitter.
* The vast majority of the communities we observed supported justice for the victims and decisively denounced police brutality.
* Black youth discussed police brutality frequently on Twitter, but in ways that differed substantially from how activists discussed it.
* Evidence that activists succeeded in educating casual observers on Twitter came in two main forms: expressions of awe and disbelief at the violent police reactions to the Ferguson protests, and conservative admissions of police brutality in the Eric Garner and Walter Scott cases.
* The primary goals of social media use among our interviewees were education, amplification of marginalized voices, and structural police reform.
In our concluding section, we reflect on the practical importance and implications of our findings. We hope this report contributes to the specific conversation about how Black Lives Matter and related movements have used online tools as well as to broader conversations about the general capacity of such tools to facilitate social and political change.
People engage in communication on Facebook via three behaviors—like, comment, and share. Facebook uses an algorithm that gives different weight to each behavior to determine what to show in user’s screen, suggesting that the strategic implication of each behavior may differ from the other. This study investigates when each behavior can be encouraged by organizational messages, thereby making clearer distinctions between three behaviors. A content analysis of organizational messages was conducted, where the researchers assessed message features and related them to each behavior separately. The findings indicated that different message features generated different behaviors: Sensory and visual features led to like, rational and interactive to comment, and sensory, visual, and rational to share. This suggests that like is an affectively driven, comment is a cognitively triggered behavior, and share is either affective or cognitive or a combination of both.
Audiences play a fundamental role in disseminating and evaluating news content, and one of the big questions facing news organizations is what elements make content viral in the digital environment. This comparative study of the United States, Brazil and Argentina explores what values and topics present in news shared online predict audience interaction on social media. Findings shed light on what news values and topics trigger more audience responses on Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, a comparison between popular content produced by traditional media versus online-native media reveals that the former lean more toward government-related news and con-flict/controversy news values than online native media. Brazilian stories prompted more social media interactivity than content from the United States or Argentina. Through content analysis, this study contributes to improving our understanding of audiences' news values preferences on social networks. It also helps us to recognize the role of users' online activities (sharing, commenting and liking) in the social construction of news and meaning inside the networked sphere. Finally, it opens an old media debate about whether providing and sharing too much media content with conflict, controversy and oddity could potentially hinder understanding and agreement in society. Articles were collected via media tracking and the data collection company NewsWhip.
The rise of social media has transformed the way the public engages with science organisations and scientists. ‘Retweet’, ‘Like’, ‘Share’ and ‘Comment’ are a few ways users engage with messages on Twitter and Facebook, two of the most popular social media platforms. Despite the availability of big data from these digital footprints, research into social media science communication is scant. This paper presents a novel empirical study into the features of engaging science-related social media messages, focusing on space science communications. It is hypothesised that these messages contain certain psycholinguistic features that are unique to the field of space science. We built a predictive model to forecast the engagement levels of social media posts. By using four feature sets (n-grams, psycholinguistics, grammar and social media), we were able to achieve prediction accuracies in the vicinity of 90% using three supervised learning algorithms (Naive Bayes, linear classifier and decision tree). We conducted the same experiments on social media messages from three other fields (politics, business and non-profit) and discovered several features that are exclusive to space science communications: anger, authenticity, hashtags, visual descriptions—be it visual perception-related words, or media elements—and a tentative tone.
Whereas much has been written about the role of resources and motivation for activating adolescents to become engaged citizens, less work considers the role that recruitment within schools might play in shaping youth civic engagement patterns. Drawing on interviews with over 100 high school students and over 40 school officials, our research illuminates the critical role that school-based recruitment plays in fostering youth civic engagement. We find that while a majority of the students we interviewed are actively involved in their local community, a sizable portion of students remain unengaged and that a lack of recruitment from school officials is one important factor explaining this phenomenon. We also find that teachers, especially social studies teachers, can play a key role in recruiting and motivating students. However, teachers tend to act as “rational prospectors” who selectively recruit certain subsets of students (i.e., advanced students)—something that likely contributes to later inequality in participation.
People increasingly visit online news sites not directly, but by following links on social network sites. Drawing on news value theory and integrating theories about online identities and self-representation, we develop a concept of shareworthiness, with which we seek to understand how the number of shares an article receives on such sites can be predicted. Findings suggest that traditional criteria of newsworthiness indeed play a role in predicting the number of shares, and that further development of a theory of shareworthiness based on the foundations of newsworthiness can offer fruitful insights in news dissemination processes.
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of news, producing a social media news agenda which has important differences from its traditional counterpart. The discussion suggests that this may be consequential for perceptions of crime and engagement with politics; it might even stimulate a partial reversal of the tabloidization of news outlets.
The growth of new media is changing how news organizations publish their work, and the explosion of social networks is changing the way news consumers of all ages share information. As news outlets face an uncertain future and try to reach younger, newer audiences, the rapid growth of mobile devices means new opportunities to create, share, and consume news content. This study examines how young news consumers share and consume news content, specifically whether they are more likely to get news through social networks (Facebook and Twitter) or directly through news sources (news stations, newspapers, websites, and mobile apps). The findings here indicate that students may hear of news through social media, but rely on other internet sources to confirm it. Local news does not seem to carry as much weight with them, but they can be persuaded to pay attention to their college towns, if only for community news and information. The findings of this study could help producers of news content tailor their information to fit these new “publishing” formats to maintain (or perhaps increase) their audience.
The growing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter is in the process of changing how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed. But so far, we have only a preliminary understanding of (1) how important social media are as sources of news relative to other media, (2) the extent to which people use them to find news, (3) how many use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use, and (4) whether these developments are similar within countries with otherwise comparable levels of technological development. Based on data from a cross-country online survey of news media use, we present a comparative analysis of the relative importance of social media for news in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, covering eight developed democracies with different media systems. We show that television remains both the most widely used and most important source of news in all these countries, and that even print newspapers are still more widely used and seen as more important sources of news than social media. We identify a set of similarities in terms of the growing importance of social media as part of people’s cross-media news habits, but also important country-to-country differences, in particular in terms of how widespread the more active and participatory forms of media use are. Surprisingly, these differences do not correspond to differences in levels of internet use, suggesting that more than mere availability shapes the role of social media as parts of people’s news habits.