Caroline Wells
Biographic Data
| ID | 226966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caroline Wells |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caroline |
| FAMILY NAME | Wells |
| SIGNATURE | WELLS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1126-9799 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 795 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Leveraging survey data, litter and photovoice to advocate for smoke/vape-free bus shelters in Boone, North Carolina
Climate Action and Native Advertising: How Fossil Fuel Companies Present Environmental Commitment in American and British News Media
Confronting severe economic challenges in the twenty-first century, many news media are forging new relationships with advertisers, including the focus of this study: native advertising. At the same time, as the climate crisis worsens, and political pressures and news coverage increase, we are seeing the fossil fuel industry expand and shift its communication about the topic. This study sits at the intersection of these trends: we ask to what ext…
Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century
The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field's contemporary concerns. In particula…
Psychometrics of the Physical Resilience Scale in Older Adults Living with Dementia: Proxy Responses
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine if proxies can complete the Physical Resilience Scale for older adults living with dementia. Methods: This was a descriptive study using Rasch analysis and baseline data from the Function Focused Care for Acute Care Using the Evidence Integration Triangle trial. The first 240 patients living with dementia were included in this analysis. Results: There was evidence of reliability based on pers…
Political Events in a Partisan Media Ecology: Asymmetric Influence on Candidate Appraisals
Political campaigns often feature jarring revelations against candidates. This study examines how audiences come to understand major campaign events, the extent to which they shape evaluations of candidates, and how their impact is filtered through an increasingly partisan news media environment. Using national rolling cross-sectional survey data collected over the 2016 U.S. presidential election period, we show partisan asymmetries in the way ma…
The Disinfectant Diversion: The Use of Narratives in Partisan News Media
The dysfunctions of American political media and their contributions to the erosion of modern democracy are actively being debated. In this light, there has been considerable empirical inquiry dedicated to understanding the role of narratives, storytelling, and the mythical “deep story” in the mobilization of the electorate. Here we seek to understand how narratives are employed by news outlets to make sense of media spectacles. We focus on cover…
Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies
Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies. Vaccari, C. & Valeriani, A. (2021). New York: Oxford University Press, $27.95 paperback, 287 pages. Social media as moderating forces in political communication? You may be forgiven for finding the idea outlandish, following years of hate speech and harassment, the polarizing effects of engagement-seeking algorithms, and mis- and disinformation circulating on soc…
Adapting PC Cares to Continue Suicide Prevention in Rural Alaska During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Narrative Overview of an In-Person Community-Based Suicide Prevention Program Moving Online
This paper presents how a community mobilization program to prevent suicide was adapted to an online format to accommodate the impossibility of in-person delivery in Alaska Native communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention, Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide (PC CARES), was created collaboratively by researchers and Alaska Native communities with the goal of bringing community members together to creat…
Assembling the Networks and Audiences of Disinformation: How Successful Russian IRA Twitter Accounts Built Their Followings, 2015–2017
This study investigates how successful Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts constructed the followings that were central to their disinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Treating an account’s social media following as both an ego network and an audience critical for information diffusion and influence accrual, we situate IRA Twitter accounts’ accumulation of followers in the ideologically polarized,…
The Disinfectant Diversion: Framing Strategies of Partisan Media in Interpreting the Covid-19 Pandemic
Following the rise of Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, political communication scholars have turned a critical eye towards the role of conservative media outlets in the construction of an overarching meta-narrative, largely referred to in the existing literature as the “deep story” (Hochschild, 2016). The aim of the present study to extend this seminal work to analyze how mainstream, conservative, and liberal outlets …
News Media Use, Talk Networks, and Anti-Elitism across Geographic Location: Evidence from Wisconsin
A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing netw…
Performing populism: Trump’s transgressive debate style and the dynamics of Twitter response
Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward “others,” bias against elites in favor of “the people,” and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication is based on analysis of candidate pronouncements, the verbal message conveyed at political events an…
Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption o…
Disinformation as Political Communication
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, we discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, we review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, we preview th…
Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: A media systems approach
How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders duri…
Disinformation, performed: Self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter
How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a 'disinformation order' [Bennett & Livingston, (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139] – represent critical, ongoing questions for political communication. We offer a thorough analysis of a highly succ…
The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How Russia’s Internet Research Agency Tweets Appeared in U.S. News as Vox Populi
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybr…
Do Improving Conditions Harden Partisan Preferences? Lived Experiences, Imagined Communities, and Polarized Evaluations
Despite growing attention to an increasing partisan divide and populist voting, little attention has been directed at how social contexts might encourage greater or lesser political polarization. We address this gap by studying how county-level conditions—economic resilience, population change, and community health—intersect with individuals’ political orientations and communication patterns to shape partisan evaluations. Our context is Wisconsin…
Modeling the Formation of Attentive Publics in Social Media: The Case of Donald Trump
Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We s…
Young Citizens, Social Media, and the Dynamics of Political Learning in the U.S. Presidential Primary Election
This study explores political learning among young adults during the 2016 U.S. presidential primary elections. We are interested in how the rise of digital and social media is affecting the ways young adults learn about political events as they happen. Using a rolling cross-section survey design, we surveyed a unique sample of American young adults every day for a period of 3 weeks. This method allows us to ask participants about breaking news ev…
Participation in Contentious Politics: Rethinking the Roles of News, Social Media, and Conversation Amid Divisiveness
When political disputes devolve into heated partisan conflicts, do the factors known to trigger electoral political engagement continue to operate, or do they change? We consider this question during a divisive electoral context—a gubernatorial recall—focusing on how media consumption, conversations, and interactions with social media feed into the decision to participate in politics. To do so, we employ high-quality survey data collected in the …
When We Stop Talking Politics: The Maintenance and Closing of Conversation in Contentious Times
Despite the democratic significance of citizen talk about politics, the field of communication has not considered how that talk is weathering stresses facing our civic culture. We examine political talk during an archetypal case of political contentiousness: the recall of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin in 2012. Pairing qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that a fracturing of civic culture took place in which many citizens found it i…
Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election
Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream pre…
Knowledge Distortion in Direct Democracy: A Longitudinal Study of Biased Empirical Beliefs on Statewide Ballot Measures
This study extends a model of political knowledge distortion by tracing the influence of cultural orientations, information exposure, and prior beliefs on changes in knowledge distortion and issue attitudes during the 2010 Oregon general election. Results show strong associations between voters’ cultural orientations and their knowledge distortion in the first survey wave and over time. As hypothesized, orientations had stronger effects on the is…
Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates
Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age
Journal Article Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age Get access Kjerstin Thorson, Kjerstin Thorson 1Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Chris Wells Chris Wells 2School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA Search for other works …
Disinformation as Political Communication
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, we discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, we review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, we preview th…
How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination: Hybrid Media Campaigning
Keywords: political communicationpresidentcampaignTrumphybridTwittertweet2016electionpublic opinionnewspaperdigital
Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: A media systems approach
How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders duri…
Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption o…
Young citizens and civic learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age
How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The…
Combining Big Data and Survey Techniques to Model Effects of Political Content Flows in Facebook
This article introduces a novel method that combines a “big data” measurement of the content of individuals’ Facebook (FB) news feeds with traditional survey measures to explore the antecedents and effects of exposure to news and politics content on the site. Drawing on recent theoretical and methodological advances, we demonstrate how such a hybrid approach can be used to (a) untangle distinct channels of public affairs content within respondent…
Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election
Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream pre…
Performing populism: Trump’s transgressive debate style and the dynamics of Twitter response
Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward “others,” bias against elites in favor of “the people,” and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication is based on analysis of candidate pronouncements, the verbal message conveyed at political events an…
Information Distortion and Voting Choices: The Origins and Effects of Factual Beliefs in Initiative Elections
To account for voter decision making in initiative elections, we integrate theory and research on public opinion, misinformation, and motivated reasoning. Heuristic and motivated reasoning literatures suggest that voters' preexisting values interact with political sophistication such that politically knowledgeable voters develop systematically distorted empirical beliefs relevant to the initiatives on their ballots. These beliefs, in turn, can pr…
The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How Russia’s Internet Research Agency Tweets Appeared in U.S. News as Vox Populi
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybr…
The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age: Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen
There is considerable controversy surrounding the study of presidential debates, particularly efforts to connect their content and impact. Research has long debated whether the citizenry reacts to what candidates say, how they say it, or simply how they appear. This study uses detailed coding of the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to test the relative influence of the candidates' verbal persuasiveness and nonverbal features…
Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century
The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field's contemporary concerns. In particula…
Modeling the Formation of Attentive Publics in Social Media: The Case of Donald Trump
Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We s…
Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates
News Media Use, Talk Networks, and Anti-Elitism across Geographic Location: Evidence from Wisconsin
A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing netw…
From Concerned Shopper to Dutiful Citizen: Implications of Individual and Collective Orientations toward Political Consumerism
Young citizens are increasingly seeking fulfillment in expressive modes of political participation, and scholars have begun to examine the implications of this trend for engagement in formal politics. While some argue that expressive practices are "crowding out" participation in more conventional civic activities, others more optimistically contend that they have expanded the political repertoires of young citizens, affording them with more oppor…
Two eras of civic information and the evolving relationship between civil society organizations and young citizens
This article explores the communicative relationship between civic organizations and young citizens as a clue to understanding the potential for youth re-engagement through digital communication. It develops a framework of two ‘civic information styles’ that contrasts the expectations of information in the mass media era with those emerging today, and proposes that one source of contemporary disconnect may be that many civic groups remain entrenc…
A Middle Palaeolithic to Early Upper Palaeolithic succession from an open air site at Beedings, West Sussex
The collection of flintwork from the site of Beedings, West Sussex (England) contains by far the largest number of stone tools from the earliest Upper Palaeolithic of Britain, and is one of the two largest assemblages of its type in Europe. Despite its obvious importance, its analysis has been hindered by several factors resulting from its early excavation. Chief amongst these is the almost total lack of stratigraphic or contextual information: i…
How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs
Objectives Voters develop not only different opinions about politics but also different sets of empirical beliefs. It is less clear how falsifiable beliefs take hold. In particular, it remains unclear as to whether news and campaign messages, moderated by political knowledge, drive the process, or whether deep‐seated values principally sway voters' acceptance of factual claims. These contrasting views point to a set of testable hypotheses that we…
Participation in Contentious Politics: Rethinking the Roles of News, Social Media, and Conversation Amid Divisiveness
When political disputes devolve into heated partisan conflicts, do the factors known to trigger electoral political engagement continue to operate, or do they change? We consider this question during a divisive electoral context—a gubernatorial recall—focusing on how media consumption, conversations, and interactions with social media feed into the decision to participate in politics. To do so, we employ high-quality survey data collected in the …
Communication, Consumers, and Citizens: Revisiting the Politics of Consumption
The year 2011 was defined by the intersection of politics and economics: the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity demonstrations, the Buffett Rule, and so on. These events drew attention to the role of politics in the erosion of labor power, the rise of inequality, and the excesses of overconsumption. Moving beyond periodic and dutiful action directed at an increasingly unresponsive government, citizens tested the boundaries of…
Do Improving Conditions Harden Partisan Preferences? Lived Experiences, Imagined Communities, and Polarized Evaluations
Despite growing attention to an increasing partisan divide and populist voting, little attention has been directed at how social contexts might encourage greater or lesser political polarization. We address this gap by studying how county-level conditions—economic resilience, population change, and community health—intersect with individuals’ political orientations and communication patterns to shape partisan evaluations. Our context is Wisconsin…
Participation in the Youth Civic Web: Assessing User Activity Levels in Web Sites Presenting Two Civic Styles
Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered …
Psychometrics of the Physical Resilience Scale in Older Adults Living with Dementia: Proxy Responses
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine if proxies can complete the Physical Resilience Scale for older adults living with dementia. Methods: This was a descriptive study using Rasch analysis and baseline data from the Function Focused Care for Acute Care Using the Evidence Integration Triangle trial. The first 240 patients living with dementia were included in this analysis. Results: There was evidence of reliability based on pers…
Naming and Integrity: Self-Verifying Data in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Information Distortion and Voting Choices: The Origins and Effects of Factual Beliefs in Initiative Elections
To account for voter decision making in initiative elections, we integrate theory and research on public opinion, misinformation, and motivated reasoning. Heuristic and motivated reasoning literatures suggest that voters' preexisting values interact with political sophistication such that politically knowledgeable voters develop systematically distorted empirical beliefs relevant to the initiatives on their ballots. These beliefs, in turn, can pr…
Young citizens and civic learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age
How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The…
Citizenship and Communication in Online Youth Civic Engagement Projects
This study analyses 36 online civic engagement websites for youth to understand the civic skills and communication opportunities offered to youth in different online environments. The research design draws on recent theoretical work on citizen identity and the design features of online communities to develop a picture of online engagement projects in two dimensions: the model of citizenship encouraged and the style of communication available to u…
Communicating Civic Engagement: Contrasting Models of Citizenship in the Youth Web Sphere
Communication aimed at promoting civic engagement may become problematic when citizen roles undergo historic changes. In the current era, younger generations are embracing more expressive styles of actualizing citizenship defined around peer content sharing and social media, in contrast to earlier models of dutiful citizenship based on one-way communication managed by authorities. An analysis of 90 youth Web sites operated by diverse civic and po…
Communication, Consumers, and Citizens: Revisiting the Politics of Consumption
The year 2011 was defined by the intersection of politics and economics: the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity demonstrations, the Buffett Rule, and so on. These events drew attention to the role of politics in the erosion of labor power, the rise of inequality, and the excesses of overconsumption. Moving beyond periodic and dutiful action directed at an increasingly unresponsive government, citizens tested the boundaries of…
From Concerned Shopper to Dutiful Citizen: Implications of Individual and Collective Orientations toward Political Consumerism
Young citizens are increasingly seeking fulfillment in expressive modes of political participation, and scholars have begun to examine the implications of this trend for engagement in formal politics. While some argue that expressive practices are "crowding out" participation in more conventional civic activities, others more optimistically contend that they have expanded the political repertoires of young citizens, affording them with more oppor…
Youtube, Twitter and the Occupy Movement: Connecting content and circulation practices
Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-rel…
Participation in the Youth Civic Web: Assessing User Activity Levels in Web Sites Presenting Two Civic Styles
Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered …
Two eras of civic information and the evolving relationship between civil society organizations and young citizens
This article explores the communicative relationship between civic organizations and young citizens as a clue to understanding the potential for youth re-engagement through digital communication. It develops a framework of two ‘civic information styles’ that contrasts the expectations of information in the mass media era with those emerging today, and proposes that one source of contemporary disconnect may be that many civic groups remain entrenc…
A Middle Palaeolithic to Early Upper Palaeolithic succession from an open air site at Beedings, West Sussex
The collection of flintwork from the site of Beedings, West Sussex (England) contains by far the largest number of stone tools from the earliest Upper Palaeolithic of Britain, and is one of the two largest assemblages of its type in Europe. Despite its obvious importance, its analysis has been hindered by several factors resulting from its early excavation. Chief amongst these is the almost total lack of stratigraphic or contextual information: i…
Political influence across generations: Partisanship and candidate evaluations in the 2008 election
Recent scholarship in political socialization has moved beyond traditional transmission models of parent-driven socialization to consider alternative pathways, like trickle-up socialization and its predictors. However, these studies have paid less attention to the diverse ways in which parents and children develop discrete political orientations, especially during a competitive presidential campaign. In this study, we examine various pathways thr…
Cultural Worldviews and Contentious Politics
Discussions about whether citizens can learn and use the information necessary to contribute to democratic governance often focus on debates about heuristics. We argue that the debate over whether heuristics should be used misframes a central issue—the consideration of what forms of decision-making are most likely to operate in different kinds of communication environments. This article examines how people make decisions in contentious political …
How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs
Objectives Voters develop not only different opinions about politics but also different sets of empirical beliefs. It is less clear how falsifiable beliefs take hold. In particular, it remains unclear as to whether news and campaign messages, moderated by political knowledge, drive the process, or whether deep‐seated values principally sway voters' acceptance of factual claims. These contrasting views point to a set of testable hypotheses that we…
Combining Big Data and Survey Techniques to Model Effects of Political Content Flows in Facebook
This article introduces a novel method that combines a “big data” measurement of the content of individuals’ Facebook (FB) news feeds with traditional survey measures to explore the antecedents and effects of exposure to news and politics content on the site. Drawing on recent theoretical and methodological advances, we demonstrate how such a hybrid approach can be used to (a) untangle distinct channels of public affairs content within respondent…
Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age
Journal Article Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age Get access Kjerstin Thorson, Kjerstin Thorson 1Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Chris Wells Chris Wells 2School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA Search for other works …
The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age: Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen
There is considerable controversy surrounding the study of presidential debates, particularly efforts to connect their content and impact. Research has long debated whether the citizenry reacts to what candidates say, how they say it, or simply how they appear. This study uses detailed coding of the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to test the relative influence of the candidates' verbal persuasiveness and nonverbal features…
Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates
How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination: Hybrid Media Campaigning
Keywords: political communicationpresidentcampaignTrumphybridTwittertweet2016electionpublic opinionnewspaperdigital
When We Stop Talking Politics: The Maintenance and Closing of Conversation in Contentious Times
Despite the democratic significance of citizen talk about politics, the field of communication has not considered how that talk is weathering stresses facing our civic culture. We examine political talk during an archetypal case of political contentiousness: the recall of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin in 2012. Pairing qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that a fracturing of civic culture took place in which many citizens found it i…
Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election
Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream pre…
Knowledge Distortion in Direct Democracy: A Longitudinal Study of Biased Empirical Beliefs on Statewide Ballot Measures
This study extends a model of political knowledge distortion by tracing the influence of cultural orientations, information exposure, and prior beliefs on changes in knowledge distortion and issue attitudes during the 2010 Oregon general election. Results show strong associations between voters’ cultural orientations and their knowledge distortion in the first survey wave and over time. As hypothesized, orientations had stronger effects on the is…
Young Citizens, Social Media, and the Dynamics of Political Learning in the U.S. Presidential Primary Election
This study explores political learning among young adults during the 2016 U.S. presidential primary elections. We are interested in how the rise of digital and social media is affecting the ways young adults learn about political events as they happen. Using a rolling cross-section survey design, we surveyed a unique sample of American young adults every day for a period of 3 weeks. This method allows us to ask participants about breaking news ev…
Participation in Contentious Politics: Rethinking the Roles of News, Social Media, and Conversation Amid Divisiveness
When political disputes devolve into heated partisan conflicts, do the factors known to trigger electoral political engagement continue to operate, or do they change? We consider this question during a divisive electoral context—a gubernatorial recall—focusing on how media consumption, conversations, and interactions with social media feed into the decision to participate in politics. To do so, we employ high-quality survey data collected in the …
Disinformation, performed: Self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter
How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a 'disinformation order' [Bennett & Livingston, (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139] – represent critical, ongoing questions for political communication. We offer a thorough analysis of a highly succ…
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