Suchergebnisse

This chapter enquires into the resonance of junk news on Twitter during the campaign periods prior to the 2019 Dutch Provincial elections and European Parliamentary elections. Querying Twitter for political topics related to the two elections, and various divisive social issues such as Zwarte Piet and MH17, we analyse the spread and prominence of problematic sources. We also examined the claim that Twitter is susceptible to abuse by bot and troll-like users, and found that troll-like users were active across all political and issue spaces during the Dutch Provincial elections of 2019. Divisive issues remain steadily (even if marginally) active in junk news and tendentious news throughout the tested time frames, suggesting these issues are year-round rather than event-based or seasonal, as they are in the mainstream media.

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse