This content analysis examines media depiction of events in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer. Using images from the Twitter feeds of nine major media outlets in the month following the shooting, it identifies themes present in those images. Descriptive statistics reveal differences in the roles of people who appear to be White and those who appear to be Black. The two groups are rarely pictured together. The visual narrative presented on Twitter depicts two distinct sides. Police are consistently shown prepared for conflict, but rarely are protesters in images with police. The implications of these findings are explored through the theoretical viewpoint of agenda setting.

This study examines the way news media framed the protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. It utilizes 510 tweets from 13 different U.S. media outlets in a mixed-methods content analysis of images tweeted by those media outlets. It looks at how protestors and police are portrayed as well as the role of race in the news images. Civil liberties, as opposed to law and order, are found to be a dominant frame. These findings suggest a change from previous research. Images of protestors were likely to include signs that are readable. Implications are discussed.

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Abstract This study examines how agenda setting works on social media in the United States. Unlike previous platform studies, this research seeks to examine not just if, but also how agenda setting works in a social media setting. Three areas were tested for their effect on issue salience: repetition, story order, and endorsement. More than 360 U.S. participants viewed variations of a mock Facebook feed and answered questions about issue importance. Using issue importance as the dependent variable and repetition, story order, and endorsement as the independent variables, three hypotheses were tested. One hypothesis had the effect predicted: Increased repetition of a news story topic did influence participants’ perception that the news story topic was important. Additional items were tested as covariates. Gender, and ethnicity had a significant influence on perceived story importance. The results of this study indicate that agenda setting on social media occurs through repetition. Implications are explored.