Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2018
This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts... more This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg. We relied on a historical database of tweets to retrieve 4,539 tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts between 2012 and 2017 and coded 2,501 tweets manually. The messages cover newsworthy events in the United States, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Tweets were annotated using 19 control variables to investigate whether IRA operations on social media are consistent with classic propaganda models. The results show that the IRA operates a composite of user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, with the lion's share of their work focusing on US daily news activity and the diffusion of polarized news across different national contexts.
Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular... more Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a Gaussianization procedure to the data, we found that contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger-causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger-causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.
Sixth International Aaai Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2012
In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followee... more In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depended upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were interconnected as followers and followees. We found that on average 10% of retweets (RT-messages) and 5% of direct mentions between users (AT-messages) in Twitter hashtags are sent and received by users interconnected as followers and followees. These figures vary considerably from topic to topic, ranging from 15%-19% within Technology, Special Events and Politics to 3%-5% within the categories Personalities and Twitter-Idioms. The results show that hard-news messages are retweeted by a considerably larger community of users interconnected as followers and followees. We then performed a statistical correlation analysis of the dataset to validate the classification of hashtag in news sections based on retweet connectivity.
In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followee... more In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depended upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were ...
This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis ... more This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine arrays of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative scenario to the hegemonic view regarding gatekeeping in Twitter political hashtags. Instead of depending on hubs that act as gatekeepers, we found that the intense activity of individuals with relatively few connections is capable of generating highly replicated messages that contributed to Trending Topics without relying on the activity of user hubs. The results support the thesis of social consensus through the influence of committed minorities, which states that a prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction of randomly distributed committed agents.
In this paper we analyze the network of scholarly collaboration in the Brazilian area of research... more In this paper we analyze the network of scholarly collaboration in the Brazilian area of research termed " Applied Social Sciences I. " We relied on methods from social network analysis to investigate coauthorship and academic collaborations extracted from the publicly accessible CNPq Lattes database. We provide an overview of academic collaboration in the CSAI area and detail the shortage of collaborations in the subarea of Communication studies. The results reported in this paper show that collaboration and coauthorships stem mostly from the institutional background of researchers, with thematic and geographic proximity playing only a minor role. In addition to that, we also report considerable higher occurrences of scholarly collaboration in the area of Information Sciences compared to Communication Studies.
E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some la... more E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both an instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they find relevant. Building on existing pre-internet systems, e-petitioning websites are increasingly implemented to make it easier and faster to set up and sign petitions. However, little attention has so far been given to the relationship between different styles of usage and the causes supported by different groups of users. The functional difference between signing paper-based petitions versus doing so online is especially notable with regard to users who sign large numbers of petitions. To characterize this relationship, we examine the intensity of user participation in the German Bundestag's online petitioning platform through the lens of platform data collected over a period of five years, and conduct an analysis of highly active users and their political preferences. We find that users who sign just a single petition favor different policy areas than those who sign many petitions on a variety of issues. We conclude our analysis with observations on the potential of behavioral data for assessing the dynamics of online participation, and suggest that quantity (the number of signed petitions) and quality (favored policy areas) need more systematic joint assessment.
In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major soci... more In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also qualitatively analyzed a group of 500 most retweeted tweets to understand the users' tagging behavior. Our results show how users appropriate tags to accomplish different effects on the narrative of the protests.
The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digi... more The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digital media matrix) in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that, the article examines the debate concerning public opinion based on the works concept of a digital media matrix is discussed together with the theories of Niels ), David White (1964) and Kurt Lewin (1947
Artigo originalmente publicado como Capítulo 14 do livro Frank Hartmann: Medienphilosophie, Alema... more Artigo originalmente publicado como Capítulo 14 do livro Frank Hartmann: Medienphilosophie, Alemanha, 2000 - Frank Hartmann é professor da Bauhaus-Universität, em Weimar.
This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platfo... more This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google , Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the topics emphasized by newspaper editors and social media users. While users of social media platforms favor opinion pieces, along with national, local, and world news, in sharp contrast the decision of news editors emphasized sports and the economy, but also entertainment and celebrity news. Common to social networking sites is the prevalence of items about arts, technology, and opinion pieces. Niche social networks like StumbleUpon and Delicious presented a greater volume of articles about science and technology, while Pinterest is mostly dedicated to fashion, arts, lifestyle, and entertainment. Twitter is the only social network to have presented a statistically significant correlation with the distribution of news items per section by The Guardian and The New York Times. The results of this study provide a bridge between journalism and audience research and present evidence of the differences between readership in social and legacy media.
In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtag... more In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtags related to a wide range of topics (political activism, health, technology, sports, Twitteridioms). We find that 70% of users in the sample tweet across multiple information streams, frequently engaging in what could be described as serial activism. We furthermore determined the dominant language in each hashtag to trace which users overlap between the thematic and linguistic communities delineated by different information streams. Although social media is frequently assumed to bring together people of different nationalities and cultures to discuss a wide range of controversial issues, our results indicate that the underlying social network that connects hashtags through overlapping users is heavily limited to linguistic and content-oriented communities. Information streams are clustered around linguistic communities, and hashtags within the same language group are clustered around well-defined topics, such as health, entertainment and politics. The only information streams that transcend language barriers are activism-related hashtags, which cluster information streams in different languages. Contrasting with the assumption that social media acts as the enabler of a globalized public debate, our results indicate a linear relationship between users who are very active in political hashtags and users who tweet across multiple political hashtags. The results suggest that activist campaigns based on social media are driven by a relatively small number of highly-active, politically engaged users.
O artigo foca na análise do discurso de mensagens no Twitter relacionadas aos protestos que ocorr... more O artigo foca na análise do discurso de mensagens no Twitter relacionadas aos protestos que ocorreram, em junho, no Brasil. Nosso objetivo é discutir as relações entre os conceitos e suas redes de sentido de forma a desvelar características e elementos que conformem padrões discursivos. Como principais resultados, discutimos o uso do Twitter para narraros protestos e mobilizar as pessoas, mais do que efetivamente para discuti-los, bem comoa presença de atores-chave, contextos e demandas, além do foco na narrativa ao vivo, o uso de hashtags panfletárias e a localização específica dos tweets.
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2018
This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts... more This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg. We relied on a historical database of tweets to retrieve 4,539 tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts between 2012 and 2017 and coded 2,501 tweets manually. The messages cover newsworthy events in the United States, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Tweets were annotated using 19 control variables to investigate whether IRA operations on social media are consistent with classic propaganda models. The results show that the IRA operates a composite of user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, with the lion's share of their work focusing on US daily news activity and the diffusion of polarized news across different national contexts.
Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular... more Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a Gaussianization procedure to the data, we found that contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger-causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger-causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.
Sixth International Aaai Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2012
In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followee... more In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depended upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were interconnected as followers and followees. We found that on average 10% of retweets (RT-messages) and 5% of direct mentions between users (AT-messages) in Twitter hashtags are sent and received by users interconnected as followers and followees. These figures vary considerably from topic to topic, ranging from 15%-19% within Technology, Special Events and Politics to 3%-5% within the categories Personalities and Twitter-Idioms. The results show that hard-news messages are retweeted by a considerably larger community of users interconnected as followers and followees. We then performed a statistical correlation analysis of the dataset to validate the classification of hashtag in news sections based on retweet connectivity.
In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followee... more In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depended upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were ...
This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis ... more This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine arrays of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative scenario to the hegemonic view regarding gatekeeping in Twitter political hashtags. Instead of depending on hubs that act as gatekeepers, we found that the intense activity of individuals with relatively few connections is capable of generating highly replicated messages that contributed to Trending Topics without relying on the activity of user hubs. The results support the thesis of social consensus through the influence of committed minorities, which states that a prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction of randomly distributed committed agents.
In this paper we analyze the network of scholarly collaboration in the Brazilian area of research... more In this paper we analyze the network of scholarly collaboration in the Brazilian area of research termed " Applied Social Sciences I. " We relied on methods from social network analysis to investigate coauthorship and academic collaborations extracted from the publicly accessible CNPq Lattes database. We provide an overview of academic collaboration in the CSAI area and detail the shortage of collaborations in the subarea of Communication studies. The results reported in this paper show that collaboration and coauthorships stem mostly from the institutional background of researchers, with thematic and geographic proximity playing only a minor role. In addition to that, we also report considerable higher occurrences of scholarly collaboration in the area of Information Sciences compared to Communication Studies.
E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some la... more E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both an instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they find relevant. Building on existing pre-internet systems, e-petitioning websites are increasingly implemented to make it easier and faster to set up and sign petitions. However, little attention has so far been given to the relationship between different styles of usage and the causes supported by different groups of users. The functional difference between signing paper-based petitions versus doing so online is especially notable with regard to users who sign large numbers of petitions. To characterize this relationship, we examine the intensity of user participation in the German Bundestag's online petitioning platform through the lens of platform data collected over a period of five years, and conduct an analysis of highly active users and their political preferences. We find that users who sign just a single petition favor different policy areas than those who sign many petitions on a variety of issues. We conclude our analysis with observations on the potential of behavioral data for assessing the dynamics of online participation, and suggest that quantity (the number of signed petitions) and quality (favored policy areas) need more systematic joint assessment.
In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major soci... more In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also qualitatively analyzed a group of 500 most retweeted tweets to understand the users' tagging behavior. Our results show how users appropriate tags to accomplish different effects on the narrative of the protests.
The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digi... more The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digital media matrix) in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that, the article examines the debate concerning public opinion based on the works concept of a digital media matrix is discussed together with the theories of Niels ), David White (1964) and Kurt Lewin (1947
Artigo originalmente publicado como Capítulo 14 do livro Frank Hartmann: Medienphilosophie, Alema... more Artigo originalmente publicado como Capítulo 14 do livro Frank Hartmann: Medienphilosophie, Alemanha, 2000 - Frank Hartmann é professor da Bauhaus-Universität, em Weimar.
This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platfo... more This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google , Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the topics emphasized by newspaper editors and social media users. While users of social media platforms favor opinion pieces, along with national, local, and world news, in sharp contrast the decision of news editors emphasized sports and the economy, but also entertainment and celebrity news. Common to social networking sites is the prevalence of items about arts, technology, and opinion pieces. Niche social networks like StumbleUpon and Delicious presented a greater volume of articles about science and technology, while Pinterest is mostly dedicated to fashion, arts, lifestyle, and entertainment. Twitter is the only social network to have presented a statistically significant correlation with the distribution of news items per section by The Guardian and The New York Times. The results of this study provide a bridge between journalism and audience research and present evidence of the differences between readership in social and legacy media.
In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtag... more In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtags related to a wide range of topics (political activism, health, technology, sports, Twitteridioms). We find that 70% of users in the sample tweet across multiple information streams, frequently engaging in what could be described as serial activism. We furthermore determined the dominant language in each hashtag to trace which users overlap between the thematic and linguistic communities delineated by different information streams. Although social media is frequently assumed to bring together people of different nationalities and cultures to discuss a wide range of controversial issues, our results indicate that the underlying social network that connects hashtags through overlapping users is heavily limited to linguistic and content-oriented communities. Information streams are clustered around linguistic communities, and hashtags within the same language group are clustered around well-defined topics, such as health, entertainment and politics. The only information streams that transcend language barriers are activism-related hashtags, which cluster information streams in different languages. Contrasting with the assumption that social media acts as the enabler of a globalized public debate, our results indicate a linear relationship between users who are very active in political hashtags and users who tweet across multiple political hashtags. The results suggest that activist campaigns based on social media are driven by a relatively small number of highly-active, politically engaged users.
O artigo foca na análise do discurso de mensagens no Twitter relacionadas aos protestos que ocorr... more O artigo foca na análise do discurso de mensagens no Twitter relacionadas aos protestos que ocorreram, em junho, no Brasil. Nosso objetivo é discutir as relações entre os conceitos e suas redes de sentido de forma a desvelar características e elementos que conformem padrões discursivos. Como principais resultados, discutimos o uso do Twitter para narraros protestos e mobilizar as pessoas, mais do que efetivamente para discuti-los, bem comoa presença de atores-chave, contextos e demandas, além do foco na narrativa ao vivo, o uso de hashtags panfletárias e a localização específica dos tweets.
In this chapter I review the legacy of tabloid journalism in the context of digital media and dis... more In this chapter I review the legacy of tabloid journalism in the context of digital media and discuss the transition from the strong editorial identity of tabloid newsprint to content curation that is both user-generated and created by paid staff members. Although the terms broadsheet and tabloid stem initially from paper size and format, I rely on this distinction to refer to editorial decisions that define newspapers' journalism standards, setting quality press (broadsheets) apart from popular newspapers (tabloids). I describe the heyday of tabloid journalism in the early twenty-first century, when newspapers shifted toward compact, visually appealing, and commuter-friendly editions featuring fewer stories with fewer words on each page and making space for the use of photography in storytelling. These structural changes to the process of newsmaking are reviewed in the context of the introduction of social networking technologies that once again disrupted newsmaking, with social media audiences behaving differently from the traditional readership of broadsheets and tabloids. I inquire whether entertainment-focused websites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed are positioned to displace the traditional tabloid media by churning out viral content that is mostly short, highly visual, sharable, and mostly accessed through mobile devices. In short, this chapter reviews the key assumptions underlying the opposition between broadsheet and tabloid in the context of digital journalism and offers a discussion on viral news websites and the personalization of news amplified by fragmented networked audiences. The article offers a contribution to the understanding of the world of tabloid journalism in the context of digital media.
Uploads
Papers by Marco T Bastos
http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/view/21459
http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/view/21459