Case study research

Media factsheets

‘We Media’ and Democracy

• This factsheet goes on to highlight how the demographic of Twitter users goes some way to explaining why it has had such an impact upon the news which is an important aspect of the political world.

• The site attracts a wide age range, with 76% of users being between 18 and 49 

• 60% of Twitter users have been educated to University level. 

• This highlight how users are more likely to be politically aware and interested in debate.

Social Media and the News Agenda

• Twitter has become increasingly influential on the news agenda as it is both a source of information and of audience discussion. 

• Information and events are often first reported on Twitter and so mainstream news uses it to source information. 

• Much hard news is sourced from more traditional outlets but global and unexpected events are more likely to be mentioned first on Twitter. 

Politics and Persuasion - with a new media focus

• In the past audiences were more passive in their consumption of media and thus more easily persuaded by those in positions of power. Individuals had little hope of getting their own personal opinions heard. But this has changed as a result of social networking sites such as Twitter. This demonstrates the shift in the powers of the audience. 

• However, despite the democratising effect of social media, it can be argued that social media sites such as Twitter have become an echo chamber for shared values as opposed to dissenting arguments. 

• Also, social media isn’t always the go to for information, as people still tune into the mainstream televised debates. This shows that even though social media is often feted as the new wave of democratization, in fact it is still the mainstream technologies that appear to dominate in terms of reach when targeting across all demographics

• ‘tribe-wired’ generation are influenced by and use new media as a way to find and utilize their political voice

Politics and the Media: An Introduction

• Some media institutions identify with specific political parties. Newspapers have always been partisan, which means they are aligned to one party. They report the news in ways that shows their chosen party in the best light. Traditionally The Times, The Express, The Telegraph and The Mail have supported the right wing of British Politics with The Guardian taking the centre-left position and The Mirror being more left wing. 

• Audiences have particular ideological expectations of these papers and are often accessing them because of the political views they hold. Uses and gratifications theory identifies that audiences like to see their own values reflected back to them in the media.

• This demonstrates the differences between new forms of media, and traditional forms of media. Audiences can come across various political ideas on Twitter, which does not represent any political party.

Media and Audiences -The Effects Debate

• Two-Step Theory (Katz and Lagerfield)

• Whatever our experience of the media, we are likely to discuss it with others. If we respect their opinion (the theory calls these people opinion leaders), the chances are that we may be affected by the opinion leaders’ responses as well as by the text itself. Opinion leaders can come in the form of reviewers, presenters on television or people from groups we admire such as religious leaders, politicians etc. as well as from our family or social groups.

• Twitter allows for audiences to come into contact with various opinion leaders, who are often verified. Users then partake in these communities, which represent their views and beliefs from Black Lives Matter (Black twitter) to extreme right wing Twitter which has characters such as Kate Hopkins. 

Media magazine

• Since 2009 Google has tailored our search enquiries based on our search histories. Its algorithm predicts which sources of information we’re most likely to be interested in, so we might miss out on material that challenges our existing worldview. 

• Internet activist and Aavaz co-founder Eli Pariser has described this as a ‘filter bubble’. An example of how the internet is no longer an independent medium but corporate-controlled.

• it is clear that the net’s existence has created more problems in the production of news than it has solved. Social media is argued to have impacted the US general elections and also Brexit result. 

• Last year the Reuters Institute reported that 28% of 18-24 year-olds used social media as their main source of news with Facebook their main source. In Galtung and Ruge’s terms, Facebook is now acting as a ‘gatekeeper’ for news. 

MM58: Social Media and Black Identity

Henry Jenkins - Jenkins believes that social media is a platform where "participatory cultures" can be established in which members can creatively channel the skills they gain online into political activism and the voicing of marginalised viewpoints. This is represented through "Black Twitter" which is evolved to become a socially-constructed community that actively challenges negative representations of black identity in the mass media and wider society while also reinforcing positive views of black identity through humour, art, activism, and education. Jenkins suggests that this has the power to influence politics and to positively shape the world around them such as social campaign BlackLivesMatter had done.

MM30: Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC. Sara Mills evaluates the power of the citizen journalist and user-generated content.

• The case of Rodney King, who was a victim of police brutality. The event was filmed by an onlooker from their apartment window and made it to prime-time news, and led to the charges of four police officers.
• The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 is another example. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists
• who provided on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded.
• The London bombings, the people who were caught up in this attack provided the majority of footage from this event
• The Hudson river plane crash made it into the news due to a twitpic of the plane crash
• Most news organisations now include formats for participation such as message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled. Social media sites are also built around UGC.
• The role of the gatekeeper has changed due to the audience's becoming producers of the news, leading to a smaller amount of gatekeepers to process UGC. Additionally, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years, meaning they can have access to UGC content more easily, making the use of gatekeepers almost irrelevant.

MM39: Social Networking and Citizen Journalism: Participating in The Arab Spring

• The Arab Spring was a series of revolutions, which began in January 2011 and went on to rock the Arab world. They started in Tunisia in January and moved rapidly on to include Egypt, Libya and Syria. Major demonstrations and unrest also occurred in Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen and Morocco.
• Social networking is a modern phenomenon whereby millions of people keep up with friends, arrange their lives and publicise their news online. Facebook and Twitter are clearly the two premium brands at the moment dictators. 
• One of the key tools for a dictator, other than the willingness to use extreme violence, is the need to keep information away from the population they want to control. The Egyptian government tried to shut down internet access during the uprising.
• The social networks (Twitter/Facebook) became a tool for the publicising of ordinary peoples’ hatred of their government and desire for change.
• The use of social networks for political purposes is nothing new. Barack Obama, in his bid for the U.S. Presidency in 2008, was one of the first major political leaders to use social networking to organise his supporters, raise money and galvanise his voters.
• These technologies, which have enabled the spread of ideas and given a voice to ordinary people, have, for good or ill, clearly made a significant difference to recent events. Information is gathered and spread far faster than would otherwise have been possible and totalitarian regimes have found it harder to hide their crimes.
• Social networking provide an expression of human wants and desires. They are tools.

Other articles

• Twitter can set the agenda for what journalists are covering 
• Example: Trump’s tweets have, over the course of the past six months, set the agenda,” according to John Parmelee, author of Politics and the Twitter Revolution. “Twitter’s basically used by politicians to influence other influencers. It’s a very small universe of people, but it’s people who can move an agenda. It’s like the practice of lobbying – people might say, ‘How can that be effective when you’re talking to such a small group of people?’ But they’re the group that’s making legislation.”
• Arguments on twitter would once have been held only within a very tightly closed circle. But now the drama unfolds in plain sight, raw and unfiltered on social media amongst politicians
• Trump has been reliant on saying ever more incendiary things to keep his name in the news it is ultimately a form of free publicity
• Political movements built via social media can grow extremely fast. They tend to be chaotic and unpredictable. The term for this is ‘leadership without leaders’. If things go wrong, there’s no one to blame.


Independent NDM case study: Up-to-the-minute web research


Twitter and the US Election

• The leading candidates for America's presidency used Twitter to energize their supporters and draw citizens who wouldn't otherwise follow political discourse. Twitter's simple and personal messages resonate in a way that more traditional means of communication 
• The presidential candidate's rise and Twitter's significance on the political stage are linked. "Twitter was taken to a new level this year because of Donald Trump," says Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin "His aggressive and unconventional use of the platform generated news" for many days throughout the campaign, even when Trump's tweets "violated standard norms of campaigns by being uncivil, conspiratorial or offensive."
• Laurie Rice, associate professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville "Twitter is also a useful form of two-way communication between candidates and campaigns and voters," she says. "Candidates and campaigns can gauge reactions to their messages in real time, voters can easily share their views, and campaigns can track and respond to voters' evolving views over the course of the campaign." 
• Political messaging now caters to social media to some degree, and consultants have turned heavily to Twitter to push their candidates' agendas. E.g. Trump is particularly using simple language to share his unfiltered views on Twitter in a way that matches his campaign branding
• A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that social media fuels widespread polarization and biased hatred.
• Political content is as prevalent on Facebook (where users mostly follow people they know personally) as it is on Twitter (where users tend to follow a wider mix of connections)
• Social media enables conversations that never would have happened without it. But the unfiltered aspect of social media has also led, on some platforms, to some very toxic exchanges
• Social media can enable the easy, fast and widespread dissemination of misinformation.
• Twitter makes political discourse more accessible, but the 140-character limit also means it's virtually impossible to share in-depth policy proposals on the service. This oversimplifies the context of campaign discourse and makes it difficult for people to get a greater understanding of the candidates' ideas
• · The current election also reinforces the idea that Twitter is becoming less of a social network and more of a news-making medium with a social bent
• · “Twitter ended up creating an important platform for political expression that has helped people find their voices."

Politics vs. Social media

• Digital technologies make it far easier than it has ever been to find out what people want – their likes and dislikes
• For now, though, the Silicon Valley worldview remains a minority one. Politicians still have weapons at their disposal that Google and Facebook can’t match: armies, currencies, taxes.
• Some argue that the hopes of a new era of democratic empowerment remain unfulfilled. Intolerance appears to be on the rise. Governments have proved more adept at using this technology to keep an eye on us than we have been at keeping an eye on them.
• “Digital technologies are the box in which we all increasingly live. Are we trapped? Or does politics still offer a way out? It’s easy enough to despair, or else to think that only time will tell. The real challenge is to figure out the answers before it’s too late.”

Trash talk: how Twitter is shaping the new politics

• Twitter can set the agenda for what journalists are covering – just think about the ways Trump’s tweets have, over the course of the past six months, set the agenda,” says John Parmelee, author of Politics and the Twitter Revolution. “Twitter’s basically used by politicians to influence other influencers.”
• To get free media, he has to say stuff that’s reportable, and the level of extreme language is directly linked back to that. They took a conscious decision to make a remark about Mexicans being rapists for his launch to throw a spanner in the works of the other launches. I suspect he doesn’t even particularly have a worldview; it’s driven by a need to feed this publicity machine.”
•  While political movements built via social media can grow extremely fast, they tend to be chaotic and unpredictable “leadership, without leaders”

Twitter and the transformation of democracy

• Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, they are different
• Of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.
• Twitter has become the de facto newswire for the planet. And, unlike the recognised newswires (Reuters, AP etc), it is available to everyone, which is why even governments sometimes now use it to release news before they give it to mainstream media

Arab Spring

• Often categorised as part of the "Twitter revolutions" or inspired by Facebook.
• The instantaneous nature of how social media communicate self-broadcast ideas, unlimited by publication deadlines and broadcast news slots, explains in part the speed at which these revolutions have unravelled, their almost viral spread across a region. It explains, too, the often loose and non-hierarchical organisation of the protest movements unconsciously modelled on the networks of the web.
• Rosen - "Revolutionary hype is social change analysis on the cheap. Debunking is techno-realism on the cheap. Neither one tells us much about our world."
• Despite the claims of Tunisia being a Twitter revolution – or inspired by WikiLeaks – neither played much of a part. In Tunisia, pre-revolution, only around 200 active tweeters existed out of around 2,000 with registered accounts

Twitter and terrorism

• Beginning in the mid-2000s, al-Qaeda has been organizing online through bulletin-board forums, which were largely password protected and sometimes required special contacts to gain access. In contrast, Twitter is something of a digital town square—a free megaphone to reach a mass audience, easily accessible on smartphones and largely unmonitored.
• There are around 30 key players, according to analysts who study global extremism online—who tweeted about territorial gains, posting photographic proof of their conquests. They also softened their hard-edged image by sprinkling in common humanizing touches, like pictures of meals and cute cat photos. And they set about trying to recruit more conscripts—including Westerners—to the cause.
•  It is impossible to scrub all pro-ISIS sentiment from Twitter, but U.S. analysts are trying to use the service to piece together a better understanding of the terrorist group's dynamics. Twitter's decision to silence some accounts but not all is fine, McCants says, and watching the group latch onto a new account when a big one is blocked can be instructive.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter emerges: Social activism on Twitter

• The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has been used frequently in support of the broader social movement or to flag general racial issues, occasionally as a form of criticism
• From its first appearance in mid-2013, Twitter users have utilized the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag for a range of purposes. Supportive or positive references to the broader movement are among the most common. But in some cases, people included #BlackLivesMatter in tweets to criticize the movement – or simply identify the subject matter of their posts and attach them to the broader discussion occurring around racial issues.
•  #BLACKLIVESMATTER becamde a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when an Oakland, California, labor organizer named Alicia Garza responded on her Facebook page to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who gunned down Trayvon Martin. Since then it has become the banner under which dozens of disparate organizations, new and old, and millions of individuals, loosely and tightly related, press for change.
•  Tweets using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that are generally supportive of the movement are much more common than those opposing it. Over the period studied, 38% of the tweets that included #BlackLivesMatter were supportive or made positive reference to the social movement.
• Slightly more than half of those, representing 21% of all the tweets using the hashtag, offered broad support for racial equality and opposition to police brutality.

Echo chambers

• 
  
• Twitter for political engagement with other users are really in fact part of an echo chamber of tweets and views. 
• According to a study, 2,000 Twitter users who publicly identified as either Labour, Tory, Ukip or SNP supporters were found to be more likely to interact with others from the same party and to share articles from publications that match their views. 
• The research was carried out by the thinktank Demos, which looked at the tweets sent between May and August last year by 2,000 people who have publicly stated their political allegiance on their profiles. 
• According to Krasodomski-Jones, the behaviour of these users were amplified by niche media outlets who used their polarised viewpoints to attract audiences. The rising popularity of alternative news is something that attracts specific groups, suggesting that these users are ideologically driven rather than for the news. 

New York plane crash: Twitter breaks the news, again

• When dozens of New York-based Twitter users started sending 'tweets' about a possible plane crash in the city, the news spread like wildfire across the Twitterverse.
• Twitter user and iPhone owner Janis Krums was on one of the New York commuter ferries diverted to pick up the stranded airline passengers. He used his mobile phone to take a dramatic snap of the downed plane, and uploaded it to TwitPic, a service that enables Twitter users to instantly share their snaps over Twitter.
• As in countless previous disasters, from the China earthquakes to the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the social media has been at the forefront of breaking and disemminating news. It provides and invaluable real-time running commentary on events, which, when taken together with the factual accuracy, analysis and commentary of the mainstream media, provides a fascinating and rich account of major incidents.

Impact of the Globalization of Social Media

• Currently, the use of social media is being used to implement change. The effectiveness of using social media as a dominate form of activism is discussed by many. Malcolm Gladwell, critiques the use of social media activism in his essay “Small Change.” He believes that social media is an effective tool to use for activism, but that it cannot make a revolutionary change, like that of traditional activism. 
• Social media activism may have many limitations, according to some, but these drawbacks will not keep it from evolving. As technology advances and becomes a resource worldwide, global connections will expand and be used as a key tool for social media activism.
• Social media makes activism easy to start as exemplified with Euromaidan. Euromaidan is a social movement currently happening in Ukraine. The protestors are actively fighting for their human rights, democracy, and freedom because the Ukraine-EU association agreement, a treaty between the European Union and Ukraine that establishes political establishment between the two parties, was not signed. The forefront to their movement is expressed through social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook. Previously in Ukraine, Twitter was not widely used until the protests began.
• Twitter is essential for the Ukraine protest because it provides the connection to further their protest by spreading information and gaining participants. In the country, its main use is to gather protesters and release events, but worldwide, it is used as a source of information to outsiders.
• Social media itself is built on weak ties because the information is not concrete, therefore, social media activism is built on weak ties. However these weak ties make it possible for information to be spread rapidly, worldwide.
• Social media activism is held back by its inability to fulfill a movement because there is no organization in charge to implement the change desired by the protestors. 

'I need peace': seven-year-old Bana tweets her life in besieged Aleppo

• Bana and her mother have used social media to chronicle their life under siege. On their Twitter account, @alabedbana, which now has more than 4,000 followers since they began tweeting on 24 September with the singular message: “I need peace,” Bana and Fatemah offer snippets of life under the bombs, and images of the carnage in their city interspersed with videos of Bana drawing with her friends or learning English.