Shannon C Mcgregor
Biographic Data
| ID | 291206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shannon C Mcgregor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shannon C |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgregor |
| SIGNATURE | MCGREGOR S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3275-0397 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 648 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Inaccuracies, omissions, and bullshit: 2024 U.S. elections through the eyes of ChatGPT
This study evaluated the accuracy, quality, and implications of outputs produced by generative artificial intelligences (AI) related to politics and electoral processes during the 2024 United States elections. We extend social media platform governance and content moderation theories to the study of AI, illustrating how large language models (LLMs), and the companies that own these technologies, shape and influence political information environme…
Unbundling Digital Media Literacy Tips: Results from Two Experiments
Recent studies have found promising evidence that lightweight, scalable tips promoting digital media literacy can improve the overall accuracy of social media users’ sharing intentions and improve their ability to determine the accuracy of true versus false headlines. However, existing research is designed to test entire bundles of such tips, which limits our practical knowledge about whether some kinds of tips are more effective than others and …
Disinformation as Cultural Narrative: Conceptualizing Disinformation as Cross-Platform, Identity-Affirming, Cathartic Stories
Rather than framing disinformation as false facts which can be countered by true facts, we propose a model of disinformation as narrative by tracing three case studies of successful disinformation across Facebook and Twitter. As stories, disinformation disseminates throughout culture and exists at all levels of media and across genres. Using a dataset of content hosted on URLs shared widely on social media corresponding to U.S. left, right, and n…
Dialogue on difference: Identity and political communication
Election Denial as a News Coverage Dilemma: A Survey Experiment with Local Journalists
Let me be perfectly unclear: Strategic Ambiguity in Political Communication
While clarity is often upheld as a core element of successful communication, we argue that a lack of clarity can also benefit a speaker, a concept called strategic ambiguity. This concept has been used across disciplines for decades, but its definitions are often overly context-specific. In this article, we follow Chaffee’s (1991) framework for explication to survey the literature and provide a unified definition of strategic ambiguity as a rheto…
No Better Than Soup? Comparing Null Experimental Effects of Political Facebook Ads Across Persuasive and Instrumental Measures of Effectiveness
Studies on digital advertising effects claim that the primary purposes of online ads are persuasive: They seek to change vote choice or voters' attitudes toward candidates. But recent scholarship has noted that social media's unique affordances encourage electoral campaigns to use them in specific ways, such as using Facebook's ads for email list-building. We conceptualize such strategic campaign goals as instrumental purposes of advertisements. …
A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms
Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars mus…
Presidential Authority and the Legitimation of Far-Right News
What position do far-right news outlets occupy in contemporary U.S. politics, and how did Trump use the power of the presidency to contribute to their rise among Republican legislators and mainstream American media? We posit that Trump’s position as president, in conjunction with his populist communication style that favored far-right outlets, contributed to the legitimation of such outlets. We first analyze Trump’s tweets during his presidency (…
Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research
A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
Mind The Gap! The Role of Political Identity and Attitudes in the Emergence of Belief Gaps
To more fully understand the belief gap hypothesis, this study examines the effect of political identity, education, and partisan media consumption on the formation of attitudes and false beliefs. Using a two-wave, nationally representative online survey of the U.S., we assess people’s attitudes and beliefs toward climate change, on the one hand, and Syrian refugees, on the other. Building on previous studies, we demonstrate that the effect of on…
Legitimating a platform: Evidence of journalists’ role in transferring authority to Twitter
Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduit…
Questionably legal: Digital politics and foreign propaganda
In this study, we map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. We find these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content to their country of origin. Firms targeted journalists and other elites, but exactly how is not clea…
Taking the Temperature of the Room
For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth…
Political Identity Ownership: Symbolic Contests to Represent Members of the Public
This study develops the concept of identity ownership to explain how, in the course of electioneering, candidates perform their own identities to align with groups whose support they seek. We frame this from a communication perspective-media are increasingly central sites for constructing and conveying the identity of candidates and the groups of constituents they seek to represent. In developing this model, we seek to bring this identity-based f…
Social media as public opinion: How journalists use social media to represent public opinion
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories a…
The “Arbiters of What Our Voters See: Facebook and Google’s Struggle with Policy, Process, and Enforcement around Political Advertising
The question of how Facebook and Google make and justify decisions regarding permissible political advertising on their platforms is increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the U.S. case and present findings from interviews with 17 former social media firm employees (n = 7) and political practitioners (n = 11). We also analyze emails (n = 45) exchanged between Facebook government and elections staffers and two campaigns, a U.S. guberna…
(Re)Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries
Content analysis of large-scale textual data sets poses myriad problems, particularly when researchers seek to analyze content that is both theoretically derived and context dependent. In this piece, we detail the approach we developed to tackle the analysis of the context-dependent content of political incivility. After describing our manually validated organic dictionaries approach, we compare the method to others we could have used and then re…
You Break It, You Buy It: The Naiveté of Social Engineering in Tech – And How to Fix It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
Twitter’s influence on news judgment: An experiment among journalists
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists ( N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news th…
In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use
This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for …
Personalization, gender, and social media: Gubernatorial candidates’ social media strategies
This study focuses on the ‘self-personalization’ of campaign politics, marked by candidates highlighting their personal lives over their policy positions. The rise of social media may be accelerating this shift. Applying Strategic Stereotype Theory [Fridkin, K. L., & Kenney, P. J. (2014 Fridkin, K. L., & Kenney, P. J. (2014). The changing face of representation: The gender of U.S. senators and constituent communications. Ann Arbor: University of …
Twitter as a tool for and object of political and electoral activity: Considering electoral context and variance among actors
In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electora…
In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use
This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for …
Social media as public opinion: How journalists use social media to represent public opinion
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories a…
Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle
This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general electi…
Personalization, social media, and voting: Effects of candidate self-personalization on vote intention
Scholars have documented growth in media coverage and popular discourse focusing on politicians’ personal lives— personalization. Candidates use social media and personalization to circumvent mainstream news media, disrupting conventional processes. This personalization arguably increases voters’ reliance on personal characteristics as voting heuristics. An online experiment exposed more than a thousand US adults to personalized or policy/campaig…
Twitter’s influence on news judgment: An experiment among journalists
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists ( N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news th…
(Re)Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries
Content analysis of large-scale textual data sets poses myriad problems, particularly when researchers seek to analyze content that is both theoretically derived and context dependent. In this piece, we detail the approach we developed to tackle the analysis of the context-dependent content of political incivility. After describing our manually validated organic dictionaries approach, we compare the method to others we could have used and then re…
Taking the Temperature of the Room
For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth…
Legitimating a platform: Evidence of journalists’ role in transferring authority to Twitter
Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduit…
The “Arbiters of What Our Voters See: Facebook and Google’s Struggle with Policy, Process, and Enforcement around Political Advertising
The question of how Facebook and Google make and justify decisions regarding permissible political advertising on their platforms is increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the U.S. case and present findings from interviews with 17 former social media firm employees (n = 7) and political practitioners (n = 11). We also analyze emails (n = 45) exchanged between Facebook government and elections staffers and two campaigns, a U.S. guberna…
Political Identity Ownership: Symbolic Contests to Represent Members of the Public
This study develops the concept of identity ownership to explain how, in the course of electioneering, candidates perform their own identities to align with groups whose support they seek. We frame this from a communication perspective-media are increasingly central sites for constructing and conveying the identity of candidates and the groups of constituents they seek to represent. In developing this model, we seek to bring this identity-based f…
Twitter as a tool for and object of political and electoral activity: Considering electoral context and variance among actors
In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electora…
You Break It, You Buy It: The Naiveté of Social Engineering in Tech – And How to Fix It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
Election-related talk and agenda-setting effects on Twitter: A big data analysis of salience transfer at different levels of user participation
This study explores frequency of election-related chatter as an antecedent to agenda setting. In this study, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of 38 million tweets from the 2012 election. Users who participate more in election talk align more with partisan media than less active users. Users who participate less align less with partisan media and more with mainstream media. Overall, agenda-setting relationships differ by participation in elect…
Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research
Talking Politics on Twitter: Gender, Elections, and Social Networks
As campaign discussions increasingly circulate within social media, it is important to understand the characteristics of these conversations. Specifically, we ask whether well-documented patterns of gendered bias against women candidates persist in socially networked political discussions. Theorizing power dynamics as relational, we use dialectic configurations between actors as independent variables determining network measures as outcomes. Our …
Let me be perfectly unclear: Strategic Ambiguity in Political Communication
While clarity is often upheld as a core element of successful communication, we argue that a lack of clarity can also benefit a speaker, a concept called strategic ambiguity. This concept has been used across disciplines for decades, but its definitions are often overly context-specific. In this article, we follow Chaffee’s (1991) framework for explication to survey the literature and provide a unified definition of strategic ambiguity as a rheto…
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
Mind The Gap! The Role of Political Identity and Attitudes in the Emergence of Belief Gaps
To more fully understand the belief gap hypothesis, this study examines the effect of political identity, education, and partisan media consumption on the formation of attitudes and false beliefs. Using a two-wave, nationally representative online survey of the U.S., we assess people’s attitudes and beliefs toward climate change, on the one hand, and Syrian refugees, on the other. Building on previous studies, we demonstrate that the effect of on…
Second Screening as Convergence in Brazil and the United States
Second screening is widespread worldwide, particularly in younger populations. We analyze a survey of college students in Brazil and the United States to compare second screening frequency, types, platforms, and motivations between the two countries. Despite lower Internet penetration, Brazilians second screen significantly more than Americans, a result of the country’s tradition of interacting with producers of television. In both countries, tho…
Dialogue on difference: Identity and political communication
Election Denial as a News Coverage Dilemma: A Survey Experiment with Local Journalists
Questionably legal: Digital politics and foreign propaganda
In this study, we map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. We find these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content to their country of origin. Firms targeted journalists and other elites, but exactly how is not clea…
Support for Protests in Latin America: Classifications and the Role of Online Networking
In recent years, Latin Americans marched the streets in a wave of protests that swept almost every country in the region. Yet few studies have assessed how Latin Americans support various forms of protest, and how new technologies affect attitudes toward protest tactics. Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (N = 37,102), cluster analyses grouped citizens into four distinct groups depending on their support for protests. Most …
What Is Second Screening? Exploring Motivations of Second Screen Use and Its Effect on Online Political Participation: Second Screen Use & Online Political Participation
This study focuses on second screening for news, a hybrid media process that combines watching news on television and a second, web-connected screen (i.e., smart-phone, laptop). Based on U.S.-national, 2-wave panel data, the paper (a) examines people's motivations to engage in second screen use, and then (b) advances the relationship between second screening and online political behaviors. Discussing and pursuing further information are both cent…
Support for Protests in Latin America: Classifications and the Role of Online Networking
In recent years, Latin Americans marched the streets in a wave of protests that swept almost every country in the region. Yet few studies have assessed how Latin Americans support various forms of protest, and how new technologies affect attitudes toward protest tactics. Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (N = 37,102), cluster analyses grouped citizens into four distinct groups depending on their support for protests. Most …
Talking Politics on Twitter: Gender, Elections, and Social Networks
As campaign discussions increasingly circulate within social media, it is important to understand the characteristics of these conversations. Specifically, we ask whether well-documented patterns of gendered bias against women candidates persist in socially networked political discussions. Theorizing power dynamics as relational, we use dialectic configurations between actors as independent variables determining network measures as outcomes. Our …
Personalization, gender, and social media: Gubernatorial candidates’ social media strategies
This study focuses on the ‘self-personalization’ of campaign politics, marked by candidates highlighting their personal lives over their policy positions. The rise of social media may be accelerating this shift. Applying Strategic Stereotype Theory [Fridkin, K. L., & Kenney, P. J. (2014 Fridkin, K. L., & Kenney, P. J. (2014). The changing face of representation: The gender of U.S. senators and constituent communications. Ann Arbor: University of …
Twitter as a tool for and object of political and electoral activity: Considering electoral context and variance among actors
In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electora…
Personalization, social media, and voting: Effects of candidate self-personalization on vote intention
Scholars have documented growth in media coverage and popular discourse focusing on politicians’ personal lives— personalization. Candidates use social media and personalization to circumvent mainstream news media, disrupting conventional processes. This personalization arguably increases voters’ reliance on personal characteristics as voting heuristics. An online experiment exposed more than a thousand US adults to personalized or policy/campaig…
Second Screening as Convergence in Brazil and the United States
Second screening is widespread worldwide, particularly in younger populations. We analyze a survey of college students in Brazil and the United States to compare second screening frequency, types, platforms, and motivations between the two countries. Despite lower Internet penetration, Brazilians second screen significantly more than Americans, a result of the country’s tradition of interacting with producers of television. In both countries, tho…
Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle
This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general electi…
Election-related talk and agenda-setting effects on Twitter: A big data analysis of salience transfer at different levels of user participation
This study explores frequency of election-related chatter as an antecedent to agenda setting. In this study, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of 38 million tweets from the 2012 election. Users who participate more in election talk align more with partisan media than less active users. Users who participate less align less with partisan media and more with mainstream media. Overall, agenda-setting relationships differ by participation in elect…
Twitter’s influence on news judgment: An experiment among journalists
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists ( N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news th…
In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use
This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for …
Social media as public opinion: How journalists use social media to represent public opinion
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories a…
The “Arbiters of What Our Voters See: Facebook and Google’s Struggle with Policy, Process, and Enforcement around Political Advertising
The question of how Facebook and Google make and justify decisions regarding permissible political advertising on their platforms is increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the U.S. case and present findings from interviews with 17 former social media firm employees (n = 7) and political practitioners (n = 11). We also analyze emails (n = 45) exchanged between Facebook government and elections staffers and two campaigns, a U.S. guberna…
(Re)Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries
Content analysis of large-scale textual data sets poses myriad problems, particularly when researchers seek to analyze content that is both theoretically derived and context dependent. In this piece, we detail the approach we developed to tackle the analysis of the context-dependent content of political incivility. After describing our manually validated organic dictionaries approach, we compare the method to others we could have used and then re…
You Break It, You Buy It: The Naiveté of Social Engineering in Tech – And How to Fix It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
Taking the Temperature of the Room
For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth…
Political Identity Ownership: Symbolic Contests to Represent Members of the Public
This study develops the concept of identity ownership to explain how, in the course of electioneering, candidates perform their own identities to align with groups whose support they seek. We frame this from a communication perspective-media are increasingly central sites for constructing and conveying the identity of candidates and the groups of constituents they seek to represent. In developing this model, we seek to bring this identity-based f…
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
Mind The Gap! The Role of Political Identity and Attitudes in the Emergence of Belief Gaps
To more fully understand the belief gap hypothesis, this study examines the effect of political identity, education, and partisan media consumption on the formation of attitudes and false beliefs. Using a two-wave, nationally representative online survey of the U.S., we assess people’s attitudes and beliefs toward climate change, on the one hand, and Syrian refugees, on the other. Building on previous studies, we demonstrate that the effect of on…
Legitimating a platform: Evidence of journalists’ role in transferring authority to Twitter
Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduit…
Questionably legal: Digital politics and foreign propaganda
In this study, we map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. We find these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content to their country of origin. Firms targeted journalists and other elites, but exactly how is not clea…
A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion
A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms
Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars mus…
Presidential Authority and the Legitimation of Far-Right News
What position do far-right news outlets occupy in contemporary U.S. politics, and how did Trump use the power of the presidency to contribute to their rise among Republican legislators and mainstream American media? We posit that Trump’s position as president, in conjunction with his populist communication style that favored far-right outlets, contributed to the legitimation of such outlets. We first analyze Trump’s tweets during his presidency (…
Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research
Political science (27 works) · Social Media and Politics (24 works) · Politics (23 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Media Studies and Communication (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Social media (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works)