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Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of which spread virally, potentially reaching new supportive audiences. During the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial election, 74 candidates for State Governor posted 20,580 tweets, of which 10,946 were retweeted almost 140,000 times. By analyzing a collection of tweets posted by gubernatorial candidates that were classified by machine learning into categories of message types, we find that while candidates tend to post tweets that advocate for themselves the most, the public is more likely to retweet attack messages and messages labeled as call‐to‐action. As measured by number of retweets, call‐to‐action tweets tend to reach the broadest audience. We also find that middle‐level gatekeepers, those with between 1,800 and 26,000 followers, tend to have the most influence over the flow of political information. Since retweets tend to bring new followers, these findings suggest that politicians wishing to grow their audience may benefit from posting more call‐to‐action and attack messages, and that candidates may wish to find ways to actively enlist the support of middle‐level gatekeepers.

We live in a world where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours, and where an unknown man or woman can become an international celebrity overnight. Virality: individuals create it, governments fear it, companies would die for it. So what is virality and how does it work? Why does one particular video get millions of views while hundreds of thousands of others get only a handful? In Going Viral, Nahon and Hemsley uncover the factors that make things go viral online. They analyze the characteristics of networks that shape virality, including the crucial role of gatekeepers who control the flow of information and connect networks to one another. They also explore the role of human attention, showing how phenomena like word of mouth, bandwagon effects, homophily and interest networks help to explain the patterns of individual behavior that make viral events. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the Joseph Kony video to the tweet that spread the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead, from the video of Homer Simpson voting in the US elections to the photo of a police officer pepper-spraying students at the University of California Davis, this path-breaking account of viral events will be essential reading for students, scholars, politicians, policymakers, executives, artists, musicians and anyone who wants to understand how our world today is being shaped by the flow of information online.

This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show that while homophily patterns prevail, some limited occurrences of cross-ideological practices exist. The cross-linking practices may include deliberative motives, but in essence they are not created for the purposes of discourse. Instead, these cross-linking practices strengthen previously held political stances of the users who create them and negatively portray and reframe content of alternative views. This represents homophily in the guise of cross-linking.

Social media are an important space for people to discuss novel policy innovations. In particular, Twitter, whose user base is skewed toward those who disproportionately affect news coverage, and by extension the public agenda, represents a particularly useful platform for policy advocates wishing to grow their audience. This article extends theoretical understandings of information flows and the growth of networked discussion spaces by examining the online discussion space around a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which has been proposed to alleviate social tensions relating to joblessness resulting from technological advances. Using content analysis and statistical methods, we show that tweets in the UBI discussion space that inform others are the most likely to be shared, but tweets that emotionally resonate with users are the most likely to reach new audiences and therefore bring new actors into the discussion space. These findings contribute to the literature on viral events and dynamic networks, providing insight into how policies like UBI are discussed and diffuse on social media platforms like Twitter.

AbstractThis empirical study addresses dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, presenting a new methodology which enables the capture of dynamism and the time‐factor of information diffusion in networks. Data was gathered on nearly 10,000 blogs and 13,000 blog posts, linking to 65 of the top U.S. presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet between March 2007 and June 2009. The article argues that the blogosphere is not monolithic and illuminates the role of four important blog types: elite, top‐political, top‐general and tail blogs. It creates a map of the 'life cycle' of blogs posting links to viral information. It shows that elite and top‐general blogs ignite the virality process, which means that they get the chance to frame messages and influence agenda setting while top‐political and tail blogs act as followers in the process.

Political campaign scholars have been concerned about the nature and effects of negative messages. Although much research has examined attack advertisements in broadcast media, more research is needed to understand attack messaging on social media. We conducted a content analysis of campaign tweets generated by candidates who ran for governor in 2014 in the United States. We examine the variables that relate to campaign attack message posting and predict its spread. Analysis suggests challengers are more likely to attack, but incumbent-generated messages are more likely to spread. We also found that attack messages are more likely than advocacy messages to be retweeted.

AbstractModern election campaigns leverage social media and the networks within to get their messages directly out to the public. We use the theory of extended party networks to explore networks of engaged users who extensively amplify messages posted by political candidates. Using Twitter data from the Senate races in the U.S. 2018 midterm election, we build Twitter extended party networks out of dedicated amplifiers to understand how those engaged users associate with the candidate message amplification. Results show that certain super‐amplifiers have a disproportionately large impact on information flows, and that decentralized networks with higher rates of follower reciprocity are associated with higher rates of message diffusion. Our study also finds some support for the idea that super‐amplifiers engage in coordinated efforts to diffuse political messages.

Zooming in on automated and semiautomated social actors created to influence public opinion on social media, we employ a novel analytic approach to identify patterns of inauthentic behavior across election campaigns on Twitter. Comparing two recent national election campaigns, the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2017 German federal election, we analyze patterns and effects of orchestrated intervention in political discourse on Twitter. Focusing on two main aspects of information flows—scale and range—we find that orchestrated interventions help amplify, but not diffuse, the candidates' messages, mostly failing to reach new audiences in the process. This study adds an information diffusion perspective to a growing body of literature on computational propaganda, showing that although false amplification is quite effective in increasing the scale of information events, in most cases the information fails to reach new depths.

Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning—from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from the Illuminating project at Syracuse University. Our objective is to explore how the stages of the campaign cycle shape political communication. We also explore social media platforms as additional factors. Moreover, given the distinct and anti-normative communication style of Donald Trump, we examine whether his communication is an outlier relative to his competition in the primaries and the general election, and while a challenger in 2016 and an incumbent in 2020. Our results suggest that campaign messaging changes over the stages of the campaign, with candidates more likely to advocate for themselves during the crowded primaries, and then engage in high volumes of calls to action in the general election. The 2016 posts were substantially more attack-focused than in 2020. There is some evidence to suggest that the global pandemic affected the ways in which campaigns used their social media accounts. Of note, campaigns seem to heavily rely on Facebook for all types of strategic communication, even as the academic community primarily analyzes Twitter. Finally, Trump's sum-total of his discourse is less negative than Clinton's in 2016 and more advocacy-focused, overall.

This study examines what types of messages users posted and spread about #Black/Blue/AllLivesMatter during the Black History Month of 2022. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, about one million tweets were analyzed to test if different levels of opinion leaders tend to spread different kinds of messages related to the context. Using the curation logic of Thorson and Well and Lakoff's semantic theory as theoretical lenses, we offer some observations about the differences in logics (incentives and norms) that opinion leaders in our dataset might face. We find that different levels of opinion leaders shared different types of messages. The implications of this study call for strategies that foster meaningful discussions on social movements amid polarized views. The study also advocates for refining platform design to encourage the dissemination of factual information over contentious arguments and reaching a societal consensus on critical social issues, such as racial inequality and police brutality. This research contributes to updating the theory of curation logics, virality, and opinion leaders, as well as provides empirical data for the discussions of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions of #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Misinformation among Mass Audiences as a Focus for Inquiry -- PART I Dimensions of Audience Awareness of Misinformation -- ONE Believing Things That Are Not True: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Misinformation -- TWO Awareness of Misinformation in Health-Related Advertising: A Narrative Review of the Literature -- THREE The Importance of Measuring Knowledge in the Age of Misinformation and Challenges in the Tobacco Domain -- FOUR Measuring Perceptions of Shares of Groups -- FIVE Dimensions of Visual Misinformation in the Emerging Media Landscape -- PART II Theoretical Effects and Consequences of Misinformation -- SIX The Effects of False Information in News Stories -- SEVEN Can Satire and Irony Constitute Misinformation? -- EIGHT Media and Political Misperceptions -- NINE Misinformation and Science: Emergence, Diffusion, and Persistence -- TEN Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons: How Environmental Misinformation Affects Environmental Behavior -- PART III Solutions and Remedies for Misinformation -- ELEVEN Misinformation and Its Correction: Cognitive Mechanisms and Recommendations for Mass Communication -- TWELVE How to Counteract Consumer Product Misinformation -- THIRTEEN A History of Fact Checking in U.S. Politics and Election Contexts -- FOURTEEN Comparing Approaches to Journalistic Fact Checking -- FIFTEEN The Role of Middle-Level Gatekeepers in the Propagation and Longevity of Misinformation -- SIXTEEN Encouraging Information Search to Counteract Misinformation: Providing "Balanced" Information about Vaccines -- Conclusion: An Agenda for Misinformation Research -- Contributors -- Index