Reassessing Twitter’s Agenda-Building Power

Conway-Silva, Bethany A.; Filer, Christine R.; Kenski, Kate; Tsetsi, Eric

doi:10.1177/0894439317715430

Cited by 61 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(62 reference statements)

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“…One important characteristic of Twitter is that it allows politicians to directly influence the public's political agenda 16 . For example, as early as 2012, a sample of journalists acknowledged their reliance on Twitter to generate stories and obtain quotes from politicians 17 .…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Relatively less attention has been devoted to the agenda-setting role of the tweets. Some research has identified the number of retweets Trump receives as a frequent positive predictor of news stories 22 (Though see 16 for a somewhat contrary position.). During the 2016 election campaign, Trump's tweets on average received three times as much attention than those of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, suggesting that he was more successful at commanding public attention 23 .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

2020

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Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

2020

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“…For example, a 'symbiotic' relationship has been identified between Twitter feeds and top newspapers. Examining tweets from 2016 US presidential candidates and issue agendas in five US newspapers, it was found that tweets (e.g., on employment, immigration, national security) frequently predicted news agendas, and vice versa [38]. In another study, it was suggested Tweets can be used to infer voter preferences [39].…”

Section: Reactions To 'Trigger' Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online influence, offline violence: language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally

et al. 2020

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The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Social movement theory suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning the rally may have engendered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right, but this has yet to be empirically tested. The presence of the movement on YouTube is of particular interest, as this platform has been referred to as a breeding ground for the alt-right. The current study investigates whether there are differences in language use between 7142 alt-right and progressive YouTube channels, in addition to measuring possible changes as a result of the rally. To do so, we create structural topic models and measure bigram proportions in video transcripts, spanning approximately 2 months before and after the rally. We observe differences in topics between the two groups, with the ‘alternative influencers’, for example, discussing topics related to race and free speech to a larger extent than progressive channels. We also observe structural breakpoints in the use of bigrams at the time of the rally, suggesting there are changes in language use within the two groups as a result of the rally. While most changes relate to mentions of the rally itself, the alternative group also shows an increase in promotion of their YouTube channels. In light of social movement theory, we argue that language use on YouTube shows that the Charlottesville rally indeed triggered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right.

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“…The intermedia agenda approach examines the ability to dictate the issues for the media agenda in its entirety and/or for the individual media outlets (Conway, Kenski, & Wang, 2015). The centrality of the social media, and Twitter in particular, has kindled a keen interest in its agenda-building role, spanning an interlinked continuum which ranges from the top-down dominance of the news media to bottom-up messaging in which the platform influences the agenda power of legacy media, while maintaining a reciprocal relationship (Conway, Filer, Kenski, & Tsetsi, 2017). Beyond the ability of one or another media outlet to set the agenda, the research focus is the convergence/divergence between the agenda of a platform like Twitter and that of the other media.…”

Section: The Public Agenda Between Legacy and Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Public Agenda in a Time of High-Choice Media Environment

Bentivegna

Artieri

2020

MaC

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Contemporary political communication is conditioned by an information environment characterised, on the one hand, by increased choice, and on the other by the fragmentation and multiplication of the ways of consuming information. This article introduces the notion of the ‘interrelated public agenda’ as a frame to study this context, taking into account elements of convergence and divergence from a single viewpoint, adopting a complex analysis model which proceeds along axes which make it possible to detect a continuum in which opposing forces are in a constant, problematic equilibrium. In this sense, we identified three dimensions which are helpful in describing public agenda interrelations. First, horizontality vs verticality, which contains the dynamics of power, and is generated in a context of political disintermediation, through the altered nature of the media system—in the complex relation between legacy media and web 2.0, and between social, institutional actors, and others. Second, personal vs aggregative, which stresses the need to take account of convergences and divergences between personal orientation towards certain issues and the aggregative pressure in different media spaces in which people feel at home: from information consumption via media diets of varying complexity to active participation in the production of content or in public discourse, offline and online. And finally, dynamic vs static, which points to the need to orient analysis towards the relation between media spaces rather than focusing on specific spaces, thus helping, importantly, to make up for the current dearth of research in comparison with studies of single platforms.

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Reassessing Twitter’s Agenda-Building Power

Cited by 61 publications

References 42 publications

Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

Online influence, offline violence: language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally

Rethinking Public Agenda in a Time of High-Choice Media Environment

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