Kjerstin Thorson
Biographic Data
| ID | 316686 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kjerstin Thorson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kjerstin |
| FAMILY NAME | Thorson |
| SIGNATURE | THORSON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5762-4688 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 566 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
We had to rely on Instagram: Activist youth in Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequalities in the Global South. This study examines how youth groups, known as coletivos , from low-income communities in Brazil used social media platforms during the pandemic to organize themselves. Our analysis focuses on the intersectionality of place and digital activism. Using in-depth interviews and online observation, the findings are analyzed through three lenses: the groups’ understanding of place, ho…
Localized Volunteer Moderation and Its Discursive Construction
The social media industry has begun more prominently positioning itself as a vehicle for tapping into local community. Facebook offers hundreds of region-specific community groups, proudly touting these in nation-wide commercials. Reddit has hundreds of subreddits focused on specific states, cities, and towns. And Nextdoor encourages users to sign up and “Get the most out of your neighborhood.” In these locally oriented digital spaces, users inte…
Embracing Dialectic Intersubjectivity: Coordination of Differential Perspectives in Content Analysis With LLM Persona Simulation
This study attempts to advance automated content analysis from consensus-oriented to coordination-oriented practices, thereby embracing diverse coding outputs and exploring the dynamics among differential perspectives. As an exploratory investigation, we evaluate six GPT-4o configurations to analyze sentiment in Fox News and MSNBC transcripts on Biden and Trump during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. By assessing each model’s alignment with p…
Truth Default or Generalized Skepticism? The Role of Overconfidence in the Relationship Between Social Media News Use and Traditional Media Use
This article examines a model positing that overconfidence in political understanding resulting from social media use for news and politics hampers traditional media use. It confirms a positive relationship between Facebook political information experiences and overconfidence in political understanding. However, contrary to expectations, there is a positive relationship between overconfidence and traditional media use. An exploratory post hoc ana…
“I Use Social Media as an Escape from All That” Personal Platform Architecture and the Labor of Avoiding News
We examine the work that U.S. young adults undertake to design and maintain their personal media worlds across digital platforms, and the consequences of those practices for news use. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with 18-34-year-olds, including a shared reading of participants’ most-used social media platforms, we develop the concept of personal platform architecture and articulate links between this architectural work and other forms of dig…
Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook
Despite the concern over deteriorating news quality on social media, few studies have empirically examined how much high-quality news is rewarded on social media. Guided by the mediatization literature, we compared the extent to which normative values (i.e. factual reporting and public importance) in news stories as opposed to social media values (i.e. popularity) contribute to actual engagement such as sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook…
Uninterested and unequal: Examining SES-based gaps in youth political behavior on social media
Despite evidence that social media are transforming American political life, fundamental questions remain about their influence on political inequality among the next generation of citizens. This study examines whether youth political behavior on social media is stratified by socioeconomic status (SES) and if political interest is the primary mechanism. Analyzing two nationally representative surveys of young Americans (18–34), we find youth poli…
Everyone Has an Opinion and there are No Rules: How U.S. Journalists Articulate the Impact of Social Media on Journalism
This study examines how newsworkers make sense of the impact of social media on journalism. We draw on the concept of metajournalistic discourse as a lens through which to analyze the web of positive and negative meanings evoked by journalists when assessing the industry impact of social media. We analyze data from a national survey of U.S. journalists (N = 1272), combining a computational analysis of responses to open-ended questions with qualit…
Who Will Tell the Stories of Health Inequities? Platform Challenges (and Opportunities) in Local Civic Information Infrastructure
The decline in the number and quality of local news media has led to digital platforms becoming more central in circulating local information, affecting what information and issues are accessible to community residents. We demonstrate this by focusing on health disparities related to COVID-19, examining how both news and non-news civic organizations in six Great Lakes communities addressed pandemic-related racial inequities. Our analysis of inter…
Speaking the language of market segmentation: How newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience
News organizations are placing a greater emphasis on knowing their audience as a route to facilitate engagement and generate revenue. Drawing on a national survey of individuals working for U.S. news organizations, we examine how newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience. Combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses, we find that the majority of U.S. newsworkers use so…
Judging Value in a Time of Information Cacophony: Young Adults, Social media, and the Messiness of do-it-Yourself Expertise
In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is character…
Correcting Sample Selection Bias of Historical Digital Trace Data: Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Type II Tobit Model
Digital trace data have become one of the central pillars of media research methods. Despite the opportunities for better understanding individual users’ true behaviors in the personalized media environment, many scholars have pointed out the potential for bias in trace data collections, questioning the generalizability of findings based on them. In this study, we propose two statistical bias correction methods–Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW)…
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…
Promoting the Youth Vote: The Role of Informational Cues and Social Pressure
Serial participants of social media climate discussion as a community of practice: A longitudinal network analysis
Serial participants of social media conversations are characterized by their sustained commitment to contentious politics. Previous research has mainly focused on the characteristics and motivations of individual serial participants. This study shifts attention to community level dynamics and applies the community of practice (CoP) theoretical framework to examine a group of serial participants who consistently tweeted about the issue of climate …
Reach the right people: The politics of "interests" in Facebook's classification system for ad targeting
Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook's business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the "right" users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise (in part) by algorithmically inferring users' interests from their data and providing advertisers with a means of targeting users by their inferred in…
Platform Civics: Facebook in the Local Information Infrastructure
Digital platforms are transforming practices of political information production and circulation in local communities. We develop the theoretical concept of local political information infrastructure to draw attention to (1) the broadening array of actors who are producing political information in local communities, in addition to local news media, and (2) the role of network media logics in shaping everyday practices of political information pro…
Committed Participation or Flashes of Action? Mobilizing Public Attention to Climate on Twitter, 2011–2015
Climate advocacy organizations are increasingly focused on citizen mobilization via social media as a strategy, proposing that by mobilizing the existing climate issue public into expressive action they will better be able to pressure policy makers. This paper explores the origins of and rates of participation in bursts of collective attention to the climate issue on Twitter over a five-year period. We find low levels of repeated user participati…
Attracting the news: Algorithms, platforms, and reframing incidental exposure
This article argues for new approaches to the study of incidental exposure that better account for the role of algorithms, platforms, and processes of datafication in shaping the likelihood of news exposure online. It offers a critique of three themes prominent in the incidental exposure literature: (1) incidental exposure connotes accidental exposure to news on social media, (2) news content is ubiquitous on social media, and (3) incidental expo…
Political Communication and Public Opinion
It is a remarkable time to be a scholar of public opinion and political communication. Not only has the political media environment been fundamentally transformed in the past 20 years, but the rate of ongoing transformation shows no sign of slowing. Digital platforms like Facebook (and its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp) are increasingly powerful curators of news and political content. Algorithms designed by platform companies enable…
Integrating Survey Data and Digital Trace Data: Key Issues in Developing an Emerging Field
While survey research has been at the heart of social science for decades and social scientific research with digital trace data has been growing rapidly in the last few years, until now, there are relatively few studies that combine these two data types. This may be surprising given the potential of linking surveys and digital trace data, but at the same time, it is important to note that the collection and analysis of such linked data are chall…
Fake News: Securing Democracy
Chapter 7 tackles the challenges posed by misinformation campaigns and fake news, an issue of growing concern in America and around the world. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, academics and pundits alike struggled to make sense of what happened, and many pointed to the role of fake news and misinformation more broadly in leading voters astray in their assessments of the two major candidates for president. This chapter draws on surv…
New Media, New Relationship to Participation? A Closer Look at Youth News Repertoires and Political Participation
This study extends past research on the relationship between news use and participation by examining how youth combine news exposure across an array of media devices, sources, and services. Results from a national survey of U.S. youth ages 12 to 17 reveal four distinct news repertoires. We find that half of youth respondents are news avoiders who exhibit the lowest levels of participation. The other half of youth respondents are characterized by …
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…
Political Inequalities Start at Home: Parents, Children, and the Socialization of Civic Infrastructure Online
We use a two-wave panel survey of parent-child dyads in the United States to connect online democratic divides with the unequal socialization of political interest in the home. We test a model connecting parent socioeconomic status to the amount of political communication in the home and the subsequent development of youth political interest over the course of an election cycle. We develop the theoretical concept of online civic infrastructure to…
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 …
Integrating Survey Data and Digital Trace Data: Key Issues in Developing an Emerging Field
While survey research has been at the heart of social science for decades and social scientific research with digital trace data has been growing rapidly in the last few years, until now, there are relatively few studies that combine these two data types. This may be surprising given the potential of linking surveys and digital trace data, but at the same time, it is important to note that the collection and analysis of such linked data are chall…
Attracting the news: Algorithms, platforms, and reframing incidental exposure
This article argues for new approaches to the study of incidental exposure that better account for the role of algorithms, platforms, and processes of datafication in shaping the likelihood of news exposure online. It offers a critique of three themes prominent in the incidental exposure literature: (1) incidental exposure connotes accidental exposure to news on social media, (2) news content is ubiquitous on social media, and (3) incidental expo…
Credibility in Context: How Uncivil Online Commentary Affects News Credibility
In the new media environment, hard news stories are no longer found solely in the "A" section of the paper or on the front page of a news Web site. They are now distributed widely, appearing in contexts as disparate as a partisan blog or your own e-mail inbox, forwarded by a friend. In this study, we investigate how the credibility of a news story is affected by the context in which it appears. Results of an experiment show a news story embedded …
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…
Moderation, Response Rate, and Message Interactivity: Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Intent to Participate
We conducted two experiments to explore how moderation, response rate, and message interactivity affected people’s intent to participate in a web-based online community. In our first experiment, 62 participants observed either a moderated or an unmoderated online community and answered questions about their intent to participate in the community. The participants who viewed the moderated community reported significantly higher intent to participa…
Political Inequalities Start at Home: Parents, Children, and the Socialization of Civic Infrastructure Online
We use a two-wave panel survey of parent-child dyads in the United States to connect online democratic divides with the unequal socialization of political interest in the home. We test a model connecting parent socioeconomic status to the amount of political communication in the home and the subsequent development of youth political interest over the course of an election cycle. We develop the theoretical concept of online civic infrastructure to…
Do parents still model news consumption? Socializing news use among adolescents in a multi-device world
This study seeks to understand how American youth (aged 12–17 years) learn to consume the news, with specific concern for which devices (television, computer, tablet, and mobile phone) they employ in consuming news. Using a national survey of parent–child dyads, we explore (1) the role of demographics in creating a home environment supportive of news use, (2) the importance of parental modeling of news use via different media devices and whether …
Good citizenship as a frame contest: Kony2012, memes, and critiques of the networked citizen
The rise of networked media has brought new opportunities and challenges for individuals’ engagement with politics. Some scholars propose that norms around “good citizenship” are evolving as well. Yet, little attention has been paid to how those debates play out in everyday cultural understandings. Drawing on the case of Kony2012, a highly visible social change campaign, we illustrate how perceptions of good citizenship can be understood as a con…
Promoting the Youth Vote: The Role of Informational Cues and Social Pressure
Judging Value in a Time of Information Cacophony: Young Adults, Social media, and the Messiness of do-it-Yourself Expertise
In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is character…
What Does It Mean to Be a Good Citizen? Citizenship Vocabularies as Resources for Action
This article introduces the concept of citizenship vocabularies and argues that these vocabularies serve as resources for civic and political action. Drawing on interviews with young adults, the author presents a conceptual mapping of citizenship vocabularies. Examples show how citizenship vocabularies play a role in constraining or enabling emerging repertoires of participation such as political consumption. The article concludes by briefly outl…
Reach the right people: The politics of "interests" in Facebook's classification system for ad targeting
Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook's business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the "right" users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise (in part) by algorithmically inferring users' interests from their data and providing advertisers with a means of targeting users by their inferred in…
Posting about politics: Media as resources for political expression on Facebook
Stephanie Edgerly*, Kjerstin Thorson, Leila Bighash & Mark HannahStephanie Edgerly is an assistant professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her research explores how changes in the media landscape provide individuals with new opportunities to engage with news and political content.Kjerstin Thorson is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern Califo…
Speaking the language of market segmentation: How newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience
News organizations are placing a greater emphasis on knowing their audience as a route to facilitate engagement and generate revenue. Drawing on a national survey of individuals working for U.S. news organizations, we examine how newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience. Combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses, we find that the majority of U.S. newsworkers use so…
Political Communication and Public Opinion
It is a remarkable time to be a scholar of public opinion and political communication. Not only has the political media environment been fundamentally transformed in the past 20 years, but the rate of ongoing transformation shows no sign of slowing. Digital platforms like Facebook (and its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp) are increasingly powerful curators of news and political content. Algorithms designed by platform companies enable…
Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook
Despite the concern over deteriorating news quality on social media, few studies have empirically examined how much high-quality news is rewarded on social media. Guided by the mediatization literature, we compared the extent to which normative values (i.e. factual reporting and public importance) in news stories as opposed to social media values (i.e. popularity) contribute to actual engagement such as sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook…
Causes and Consequences of Selective Exposure Among Political Blog Readers: The Role of Hostile Media Perception in Motivated Media Use and Expressive Participation
Concerns about selective exposure to partisan information have become a mainstay for scholars of political communication in the changing media environment. This study draws on a survey of a unique population—readers of political blogs—to explore the relationship between perceptions of mainstream media bias (as hostile media perception) and selective exposure to media sources that provide like-minded information as well as social support. We find …
Correcting Sample Selection Bias of Historical Digital Trace Data: Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Type II Tobit Model
Digital trace data have become one of the central pillars of media research methods. Despite the opportunities for better understanding individual users’ true behaviors in the personalized media environment, many scholars have pointed out the potential for bias in trace data collections, questioning the generalizability of findings based on them. In this study, we propose two statistical bias correction methods–Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW)…
Connected political consumers: Transforming personalized politics among youth into broader repertoires of action
This study explores political consumerism motivations in an effort to understand the complex ways in which this lifestyle practice fits into the broader participation repertoires of young citizens. We begin by outlining the psychological motivations for political consumerism, and theorize how they might orient political consumers toward (and away from) online expressive, political, and civic participation. In particular, we examine how the desire…
Everyone Has an Opinion and there are No Rules: How U.S. Journalists Articulate the Impact of Social Media on Journalism
This study examines how newsworkers make sense of the impact of social media on journalism. We draw on the concept of metajournalistic discourse as a lens through which to analyze the web of positive and negative meanings evoked by journalists when assessing the industry impact of social media. We analyze data from a national survey of U.S. journalists (N = 1272), combining a computational analysis of responses to open-ended questions with qualit…
Searching and Clustering Methodologies: Connecting Political Communication Content across Platforms
People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content b…
Relationships Between Blogs as Ewom and Interactivity, Perceived Interactivity, and Parasocial Interaction
The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of a political candidate's blog-a form of eWOM (electronic Word-of-Mouth)-on attitudes toward the website, attitudes toward the political candidate, and intentions to vote. The results showed that interactivity in the form of a blog significantly influenced attitude toward the website, but not attitudes toward the candidate or voting intention. However, perceived interactivity influenced all…
Moderation, Response Rate, and Message Interactivity: Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Intent to Participate
We conducted two experiments to explore how moderation, response rate, and message interactivity affected people’s intent to participate in a web-based online community. In our first experiment, 62 participants observed either a moderated or an unmoderated online community and answered questions about their intent to participate in the community. The participants who viewed the moderated community reported significantly higher intent to participa…
Youtube and Proposition 8: A case study in video activism
The present study uses California's Proposition 8 campaign as a case study for an exploratory investigation of video activism online. We conducted a content analysis of a sample of Proposition 8 videos drawn at random from the results of a keyword search of YouTube. Main findings from the analysis (N = 801) show that a majority of the videos were made up of original content and took a position against Proposition 8. The results also show that vid…
Credibility in Context: How Uncivil Online Commentary Affects News Credibility
In the new media environment, hard news stories are no longer found solely in the "A" section of the paper or on the front page of a news Web site. They are now distributed widely, appearing in contexts as disparate as a partisan blog or your own e-mail inbox, forwarded by a friend. In this study, we investigate how the credibility of a news story is affected by the context in which it appears. Results of an experiment show a news story embedded …
What Does It Mean to Be a Good Citizen? Citizenship Vocabularies as Resources for Action
This article introduces the concept of citizenship vocabularies and argues that these vocabularies serve as resources for civic and political action. Drawing on interviews with young adults, the author presents a conceptual mapping of citizenship vocabularies. Examples show how citizenship vocabularies play a role in constraining or enabling emerging repertoires of participation such as political consumption. The article concludes by briefly outl…
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…
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…
Facing an uncertain reception: Young citizens and political interaction on Facebook
This article explores how the social ambiguities concerning audience and reception of posts on Facebook shape the forms of political interaction among young citizens on the site. Two sets of in-depth interviews are used to illustrate the ways that uncertainties about audience reception on Facebook inspire strategies for ‘inventing’ modes of political interaction on the one hand, and, for others, suppress opinion expression by creating the sense t…
How individual sensitivities to disagreement shape youth political expression on Facebook
Causes and Consequences of Selective Exposure Among Political Blog Readers: The Role of Hostile Media Perception in Motivated Media Use and Expressive Participation
Concerns about selective exposure to partisan information have become a mainstay for scholars of political communication in the changing media environment. This study draws on a survey of a unique population—readers of political blogs—to explore the relationship between perceptions of mainstream media bias (as hostile media perception) and selective exposure to media sources that provide like-minded information as well as social support. We find …
Good citizenship as a frame contest: Kony2012, memes, and critiques of the networked citizen
The rise of networked media has brought new opportunities and challenges for individuals’ engagement with politics. Some scholars propose that norms around “good citizenship” are evolving as well. Yet, little attention has been paid to how those debates play out in everyday cultural understandings. Drawing on the case of Kony2012, a highly visible social change campaign, we illustrate how perceptions of good citizenship can be understood as a con…
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 …
Searching and Clustering Methodologies: Connecting Political Communication Content across Platforms
People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content b…
Posting about politics: Media as resources for political expression on Facebook
Stephanie Edgerly*, Kjerstin Thorson, Leila Bighash & Mark HannahStephanie Edgerly is an assistant professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her research explores how changes in the media landscape provide individuals with new opportunities to engage with news and political content.Kjerstin Thorson is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern Califo…
Partisan Selective Sharing: The Biased Diffusion of Fact-Checking Messages on Social Media
Using large Twitter datasets collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we examined how partisanship shapes patterns of sharing and commenting on candidate fact-check rulings. Our results indicate that partisans selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party's candidate, resulting in an ideologically narrow flow of fact checks to their followers. We also find evidence of hos…
Do parents still model news consumption? Socializing news use among adolescents in a multi-device world
This study seeks to understand how American youth (aged 12–17 years) learn to consume the news, with specific concern for which devices (television, computer, tablet, and mobile phone) they employ in consuming news. Using a national survey of parent–child dyads, we explore (1) the role of demographics in creating a home environment supportive of news use, (2) the importance of parental modeling of news use via different media devices and whether …
Connected political consumers: Transforming personalized politics among youth into broader repertoires of action
This study explores political consumerism motivations in an effort to understand the complex ways in which this lifestyle practice fits into the broader participation repertoires of young citizens. We begin by outlining the psychological motivations for political consumerism, and theorize how they might orient political consumers toward (and away from) online expressive, political, and civic participation. In particular, we examine how the desire…
Fake News: Securing Democracy
Chapter 7 tackles the challenges posed by misinformation campaigns and fake news, an issue of growing concern in America and around the world. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, academics and pundits alike struggled to make sense of what happened, and many pointed to the role of fake news and misinformation more broadly in leading voters astray in their assessments of the two major candidates for president. This chapter draws on surv…
New Media, New Relationship to Participation? A Closer Look at Youth News Repertoires and Political Participation
This study extends past research on the relationship between news use and participation by examining how youth combine news exposure across an array of media devices, sources, and services. Results from a national survey of U.S. youth ages 12 to 17 reveal four distinct news repertoires. We find that half of youth respondents are news avoiders who exhibit the lowest levels of participation. The other half of youth respondents are characterized by …
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…
Political Inequalities Start at Home: Parents, Children, and the Socialization of Civic Infrastructure Online
We use a two-wave panel survey of parent-child dyads in the United States to connect online democratic divides with the unequal socialization of political interest in the home. We test a model connecting parent socioeconomic status to the amount of political communication in the home and the subsequent development of youth political interest over the course of an election cycle. We develop the theoretical concept of online civic infrastructure to…
Integrating Survey Data and Digital Trace Data: Key Issues in Developing an Emerging Field
While survey research has been at the heart of social science for decades and social scientific research with digital trace data has been growing rapidly in the last few years, until now, there are relatively few studies that combine these two data types. This may be surprising given the potential of linking surveys and digital trace data, but at the same time, it is important to note that the collection and analysis of such linked data are chall…
Platform Civics: Facebook in the Local Information Infrastructure
Digital platforms are transforming practices of political information production and circulation in local communities. We develop the theoretical concept of local political information infrastructure to draw attention to (1) the broadening array of actors who are producing political information in local communities, in addition to local news media, and (2) the role of network media logics in shaping everyday practices of political information pro…
Committed Participation or Flashes of Action? Mobilizing Public Attention to Climate on Twitter, 2011–2015
Climate advocacy organizations are increasingly focused on citizen mobilization via social media as a strategy, proposing that by mobilizing the existing climate issue public into expressive action they will better be able to pressure policy makers. This paper explores the origins of and rates of participation in bursts of collective attention to the climate issue on Twitter over a five-year period. We find low levels of repeated user participati…
Social Media and Politics (36 works) · Political science (34 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Politics (23 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Media Studies and Communication (20 works) · Social media (20 works) · Public relations (19 works)