The inter-media agenda-setting influence of social media activism on Egyptian news sites: a case study of violence against women (VAW)

Abstract

This study has three main aims which are to examine the first level of inter-media agenda-setting between social media activism & Egyptian news sites regarding VAW issues, to determine if there is a role for social media activism in setting the news sites' issue agendas & to identify news sources types used by news sites. The study conducted interviews with five Egyptian journalists and a content analysis over one month with high social media activism regarding VAW in 2022 between a purposive sample of posts on Facebook & Instagram and news from three popular news sites with different ownership types; Bawbat Al-Ahram, Al-Watan & Bawbat Al-Wafad. It applied rank order & cross-lagged correlation analyses along with Rozelle-Campell baseline. Findingsshow there is a kind of similarity between all issue agendas of the platforms and news sites in terms of rank order but there is a weak influence of social media activism regarding VAW issues on the Egyptian news sites' agendas. This can be illustrated by the no transfer of issue salience from Instagram to any of the news sites but there is a transfer of issue salience in one of the time spans only from Facebook to Al-Watan, private news site. However, journalists' mentioned that social media activism content can affect their news sites' agendas after this content meet certain conditions. Also, findings reveal that the most used news sources are external news sources especially security officials.