Susan Vermeer
Biographic Data
| ID | 384553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Vermeer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Vermeer |
| SIGNATURE | VERMEER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9829-8057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Defining political influencers
Political influencer scholarship is still in its infancy. To date, there is no clear consensus on what constitutes a political influencer. This is essential to advance theoretical development, enable systematic empirical research, and inform public debate in an increasingly mediatized political landscape. To address this gap, we conducted two studies to develop a comprehensive conceptualization of political influencers. First, we conducted a scop…
Online political advertising literacy
This study reviews the literature on online political advertising literacy, sorting concepts and evidence. Through reflexive thematic analysis of 39 articles, we identify key concepts, interventions, and reported effects of online political advertising literacy. Based on this analysis, we propose a definition that includes conceptual understanding, evaluation, ethical considerations, and skills as components necessary for interpreting political a…
Shifted by Similarity? How Politically Targeted Ads Based on Party and Issue Persuade Voters
The scientific literature offers crucial insights into ad effectiveness; however, we argue that research on political advertising should extend beyond measuring success in terms of voting preferences by examining its influence on public opinion regarding broader societal issues. In this paper, we used two experimental designs to examine how politically targeted ads influence people’s attitudes and their stance on the featured issue (i.e., a sugar…
AI meets politics
This study investigates the persuasive effects of messages generated with artificial intelligence in online political targeting, focusing on three distinct strategies: targeting based on political orientation, age, and personality traits. Through an experimental design conducted across 15 countries ( N = 7118), we uncovered that political targeting based on voters’ pre-existing political orientation, receiving messages from a party that is alread…
Embedding, embedding on the wall; who is the most prominent politician of them all? Exploring automated methods to study multimodal political news coverage
Although it is widely acknowledged that political communication is multimodal and that textual and visual modalities have an interactive effect on how content is interpreted, research thereto is still limited. In particular, methods for creating multimodal datasets are rarely discussed; their validation is typically omitted. This study addresses this gap by (1) designing and validating a reliable method to create a multimodal dataset, and (2) use…
How Ads Get in Our Head
This study aims to understand how people process, think about, and respond to targeted political ads (political microtargeting). Using an extensive online thought-listing experiment (N = 1,196), we are able to closely examine how people process targeted political advertising by exploring their cognitive responses. Results show that targeted political ads that are incongruent (mistargeted based on people’s political preferences) lead people to lis…
What is Popular Gets More Popular? Exploring Over-Time Dynamics in Article Readership Using Real-World Log Data
Online news can be shared and promoted via social media, mobile push messages, newsletters, "most read" boxes, or the like. This can result in feedback loops, in which views attract even more views. Using full click logs for five regional newspapers in the Netherlands, spanning N views = 12,108,263 views of N articles = 17,982 articles for each minute over the course of 13 weeks, we shed light on potential feedback loops. While article placement …
What’s on and who’s Watching? Combining People-Meter Data and Subtitle Data to Explore Television Exposure to Political News
Understanding television viewing behavior is highly relevant, as it remains an important source of political news for many. Nowadays, viewers can choose between a growing diversity of formats covering political news, varying from traditional news broadcasts to late-night talk shows and satire. Yet, we have little to no information about the specific political content provided by television programs; and much less how this can be connected to view…
Still going strong? The role of traditional media in the 2021 Dutch parliamentary elections
Contact us! An audit study to examine the responsiveness of political elites on social media during a Dutch election
In this paper, we report on the findings of a correspondence audit study to examine the responsiveness of political candidates on social media in relation to ethnicity. This study examines how responsive political candidates are to private social media messages (i.e., Facebook). Drawing on established theoretical insights, we focus on responsiveness of candidates to a citizen with a Dutch and non-Dutch name. More specifically we take into account…
The News Sharing Gap
Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine periods and (b) across eight countries: Australia, Austr…
Instaworthy? Examining the Effects of (Targeted) Civic Education Ads on Instagram
The last few years have witnessed a growing societal and scholarly interest in the potential of online political microtargeting to affect election outcomes in favor of parties and candidates. It has often been rightly pointed out that political microtargeting can pose risks to electoral integrity in democracies. But can political microtargeting also benefit democratic functioning? Very little is known about the potential of political microtargeti…
Electoral news sharing
Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elec…
Break a Story
The increasing reliance on social media as a source of news, particularly among adolescents, raises important questions for democracy regarding the potential of these platforms to promote engagement with politics. This study sought to examine adolescents’ affective (emotions, feelings), behavioural (actions and issue-specific interest), and cognitive (issue-specific knowledge) responses to political news on Instagram Stories. We conducted a field…
Cutting Through the Comment Chaos
Social scientists often study comments on YouTube to learn about people’s attitudes towards and experiences of online videos. However, not all YouTube comments are relevant in the sense that they reflect individuals’ thoughts about, or experiences of the content of a video or its artist/maker. Therefore, the present paper employs Supervised Machine Learning to automatically assess comments written in response to music videos in terms of their rel…
Using Panel Data to Study Political Interest, News Media Trust, and News Media use in the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
During times of crisis or instability, citizens are more reliant on news media as a source of information. We need to better understand which news media people consume, how it changes over time, and whether two important predictors of news use – political interest and news media trust – affect news use during times of crisis. Specifically, we investigate the reciprocal dynamics between news media use, political interest, and news media trust in t…
(Tar)getting you
This study examines how mainstream political actors and other organizations use political targeted messages. For this purpose, a data set from ProPublica is used. The study examines 55,918 sponsored Facebook ads that were posted by 236 political actors (i.e., political elites and other organizations) in the United States. (1) Topic classification was used to identify policy issues, (2) network analysis to identify the main policy issues from the …
Online News User Journeys
The complexity and diversity of today’s media landscape provides many challenges for scholars studying online news consumption. Yet it is unclear how news consumers navigate online. Moving forward, we used a custom-built browser plug-in—passively tracking Dutch online news consumers 24/7—to examine how context (website) and content (news topic) features affect patterns of online news consumption. This resulted in a data set containing more than o…
WhatsApp with Politics
With an increasing number of people, especially adolescents, using more private online platforms, such as WhatsApp, for news, an important question for democracy is whether such platforms can facilitate learning about politics and current events. In this study, we examine adolescents’ affective (emotions, feelings), behavioral (actions and behavioral intentions), and cognitive (political knowledge) responses to interpersonal political discussion …
Toward a Better Understanding of News User Journeys
In recent years, the volume of clickstream and user data collected by news organizations has reached enormous proportions. As a result, news organizations—as well as journalism scholars—face novel methodological challenges to describe and analyze this wealth of information. To move forward, we demonstrate a computational approach to understand the news journeys Web users take to find the news they want to read. We propose the use of Markov chains…
Keep the Ball Rolling
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans. By using a sample of over 4.5 million tweets, we applied a social networks approach to examine whether and, if so, how different types of users influence online engagement and patterns of information flow of professional football clubs on Twitter. We focus on five types of social mediators (i.e., key users who connect organizations with their p…
Using Panel Data to Study Political Interest, News Media Trust, and News Media use in the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
During times of crisis or instability, citizens are more reliant on news media as a source of information. We need to better understand which news media people consume, how it changes over time, and whether two important predictors of news use – political interest and news media trust – affect news use during times of crisis. Specifically, we investigate the reciprocal dynamics between news media use, political interest, and news media trust in t…
WhatsApp with Politics
With an increasing number of people, especially adolescents, using more private online platforms, such as WhatsApp, for news, an important question for democracy is whether such platforms can facilitate learning about politics and current events. In this study, we examine adolescents’ affective (emotions, feelings), behavioral (actions and behavioral intentions), and cognitive (political knowledge) responses to interpersonal political discussion …
(Tar)getting you
This study examines how mainstream political actors and other organizations use political targeted messages. For this purpose, a data set from ProPublica is used. The study examines 55,918 sponsored Facebook ads that were posted by 236 political actors (i.e., political elites and other organizations) in the United States. (1) Topic classification was used to identify policy issues, (2) network analysis to identify the main policy issues from the …
Still going strong? The role of traditional media in the 2021 Dutch parliamentary elections
Contact us! An audit study to examine the responsiveness of political elites on social media during a Dutch election
In this paper, we report on the findings of a correspondence audit study to examine the responsiveness of political candidates on social media in relation to ethnicity. This study examines how responsive political candidates are to private social media messages (i.e., Facebook). Drawing on established theoretical insights, we focus on responsiveness of candidates to a citizen with a Dutch and non-Dutch name. More specifically we take into account…
Cutting Through the Comment Chaos
Social scientists often study comments on YouTube to learn about people’s attitudes towards and experiences of online videos. However, not all YouTube comments are relevant in the sense that they reflect individuals’ thoughts about, or experiences of the content of a video or its artist/maker. Therefore, the present paper employs Supervised Machine Learning to automatically assess comments written in response to music videos in terms of their rel…
Toward a Better Understanding of News User Journeys
In recent years, the volume of clickstream and user data collected by news organizations has reached enormous proportions. As a result, news organizations—as well as journalism scholars—face novel methodological challenges to describe and analyze this wealth of information. To move forward, we demonstrate a computational approach to understand the news journeys Web users take to find the news they want to read. We propose the use of Markov chains…
Keep the Ball Rolling
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans. By using a sample of over 4.5 million tweets, we applied a social networks approach to examine whether and, if so, how different types of users influence online engagement and patterns of information flow of professional football clubs on Twitter. We focus on five types of social mediators (i.e., key users who connect organizations with their p…
Keep the Ball Rolling
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans. By using a sample of over 4.5 million tweets, we applied a social networks approach to examine whether and, if so, how different types of users influence online engagement and patterns of information flow of professional football clubs on Twitter. We focus on five types of social mediators (i.e., key users who connect organizations with their p…
Online News User Journeys
The complexity and diversity of today’s media landscape provides many challenges for scholars studying online news consumption. Yet it is unclear how news consumers navigate online. Moving forward, we used a custom-built browser plug-in—passively tracking Dutch online news consumers 24/7—to examine how context (website) and content (news topic) features affect patterns of online news consumption. This resulted in a data set containing more than o…
WhatsApp with Politics
With an increasing number of people, especially adolescents, using more private online platforms, such as WhatsApp, for news, an important question for democracy is whether such platforms can facilitate learning about politics and current events. In this study, we examine adolescents’ affective (emotions, feelings), behavioral (actions and behavioral intentions), and cognitive (political knowledge) responses to interpersonal political discussion …
Toward a Better Understanding of News User Journeys
In recent years, the volume of clickstream and user data collected by news organizations has reached enormous proportions. As a result, news organizations—as well as journalism scholars—face novel methodological challenges to describe and analyze this wealth of information. To move forward, we demonstrate a computational approach to understand the news journeys Web users take to find the news they want to read. We propose the use of Markov chains…
Using Panel Data to Study Political Interest, News Media Trust, and News Media use in the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
During times of crisis or instability, citizens are more reliant on news media as a source of information. We need to better understand which news media people consume, how it changes over time, and whether two important predictors of news use – political interest and news media trust – affect news use during times of crisis. Specifically, we investigate the reciprocal dynamics between news media use, political interest, and news media trust in t…
(Tar)getting you
This study examines how mainstream political actors and other organizations use political targeted messages. For this purpose, a data set from ProPublica is used. The study examines 55,918 sponsored Facebook ads that were posted by 236 political actors (i.e., political elites and other organizations) in the United States. (1) Topic classification was used to identify policy issues, (2) network analysis to identify the main policy issues from the …
The News Sharing Gap
Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine periods and (b) across eight countries: Australia, Austr…
Instaworthy? Examining the Effects of (Targeted) Civic Education Ads on Instagram
The last few years have witnessed a growing societal and scholarly interest in the potential of online political microtargeting to affect election outcomes in favor of parties and candidates. It has often been rightly pointed out that political microtargeting can pose risks to electoral integrity in democracies. But can political microtargeting also benefit democratic functioning? Very little is known about the potential of political microtargeti…
Electoral news sharing
Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elec…
Break a Story
The increasing reliance on social media as a source of news, particularly among adolescents, raises important questions for democracy regarding the potential of these platforms to promote engagement with politics. This study sought to examine adolescents’ affective (emotions, feelings), behavioural (actions and issue-specific interest), and cognitive (issue-specific knowledge) responses to political news on Instagram Stories. We conducted a field…
Cutting Through the Comment Chaos
Social scientists often study comments on YouTube to learn about people’s attitudes towards and experiences of online videos. However, not all YouTube comments are relevant in the sense that they reflect individuals’ thoughts about, or experiences of the content of a video or its artist/maker. Therefore, the present paper employs Supervised Machine Learning to automatically assess comments written in response to music videos in terms of their rel…
What is Popular Gets More Popular? Exploring Over-Time Dynamics in Article Readership Using Real-World Log Data
Online news can be shared and promoted via social media, mobile push messages, newsletters, "most read" boxes, or the like. This can result in feedback loops, in which views attract even more views. Using full click logs for five regional newspapers in the Netherlands, spanning N views = 12,108,263 views of N articles = 17,982 articles for each minute over the course of 13 weeks, we shed light on potential feedback loops. While article placement …
What’s on and who’s Watching? Combining People-Meter Data and Subtitle Data to Explore Television Exposure to Political News
Understanding television viewing behavior is highly relevant, as it remains an important source of political news for many. Nowadays, viewers can choose between a growing diversity of formats covering political news, varying from traditional news broadcasts to late-night talk shows and satire. Yet, we have little to no information about the specific political content provided by television programs; and much less how this can be connected to view…
Still going strong? The role of traditional media in the 2021 Dutch parliamentary elections
Contact us! An audit study to examine the responsiveness of political elites on social media during a Dutch election
In this paper, we report on the findings of a correspondence audit study to examine the responsiveness of political candidates on social media in relation to ethnicity. This study examines how responsive political candidates are to private social media messages (i.e., Facebook). Drawing on established theoretical insights, we focus on responsiveness of candidates to a citizen with a Dutch and non-Dutch name. More specifically we take into account…
Embedding, embedding on the wall; who is the most prominent politician of them all? Exploring automated methods to study multimodal political news coverage
Although it is widely acknowledged that political communication is multimodal and that textual and visual modalities have an interactive effect on how content is interpreted, research thereto is still limited. In particular, methods for creating multimodal datasets are rarely discussed; their validation is typically omitted. This study addresses this gap by (1) designing and validating a reliable method to create a multimodal dataset, and (2) use…
How Ads Get in Our Head
This study aims to understand how people process, think about, and respond to targeted political ads (political microtargeting). Using an extensive online thought-listing experiment (N = 1,196), we are able to closely examine how people process targeted political advertising by exploring their cognitive responses. Results show that targeted political ads that are incongruent (mistargeted based on people’s political preferences) lead people to lis…
Defining political influencers
Political influencer scholarship is still in its infancy. To date, there is no clear consensus on what constitutes a political influencer. This is essential to advance theoretical development, enable systematic empirical research, and inform public debate in an increasingly mediatized political landscape. To address this gap, we conducted two studies to develop a comprehensive conceptualization of political influencers. First, we conducted a scop…
Online political advertising literacy
This study reviews the literature on online political advertising literacy, sorting concepts and evidence. Through reflexive thematic analysis of 39 articles, we identify key concepts, interventions, and reported effects of online political advertising literacy. Based on this analysis, we propose a definition that includes conceptual understanding, evaluation, ethical considerations, and skills as components necessary for interpreting political a…
Shifted by Similarity? How Politically Targeted Ads Based on Party and Issue Persuade Voters
The scientific literature offers crucial insights into ad effectiveness; however, we argue that research on political advertising should extend beyond measuring success in terms of voting preferences by examining its influence on public opinion regarding broader societal issues. In this paper, we used two experimental designs to examine how politically targeted ads influence people’s attitudes and their stance on the featured issue (i.e., a sugar…
AI meets politics
This study investigates the persuasive effects of messages generated with artificial intelligence in online political targeting, focusing on three distinct strategies: targeting based on political orientation, age, and personality traits. Through an experimental design conducted across 15 countries ( N = 7118), we uncovered that political targeting based on voters’ pre-existing political orientation, receiving messages from a party that is alread…
Politics (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Media Studies and Communication (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Social media (8 works) · Business (7 works)