Suchergebnisse

Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter hashtag campaign, #WhereIsTheInterpreter, was launched in the UK, protesting the lack of accessibility during official press briefings around the epidemic. The campaign received support from across the globe. This study analyzes the discourse around the campaign in tweets published from March 1st, 2020 and September 30th, 2021 ( N = 27,021) and analyzed the corpus using the Analysis of Topic Model Network (ANTMN) approach. We identified four major themes of discourse: discrimination, accessibility challenges, communication gaps and barriers, and Deaf rights. We analyze the discourse through the perspective of Critical Disability Theory (CDT) and hashtag activism, and discuss practical and theoretical implications.

Studies have demonstrated an increase in the use of strategy framing in coverage of political campaigns over the years, and during campaign cycles. Despite increases in politicians' and voters' use of social media, very little is known about the use of framing in e-campaigns. This study examines Republican presidential candidates' Twitter activity during the 2016 primaries (more than 22,000 tweets). We find that only two candidates, Donald Trump, and John Kasich, have followed the news media tendency to emphasize strategy over issues. Also, candidates dedicated more than a third of their Twitter activity to updating followers on events and the campaign. Using time-series analysis, we found that the use of framing was dynamic over time, with issue framing increasing around debates and strategy around voting days. This study contributes to our understanding of the use of social media as a complementary and alternative method for direct communication between candidates and their voters.

Drawing on theories of identity politics and partisan polarization, we explored the politicization of Google Play's news app reviews—an explicitly non-political domain. Using a mixed-methods approach, Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMNs), combining topic modeling, network analysis, community detection, and theory-driven qualitative reading, we analyzed 759,143 reviews from 2009 to 2022 across 46 news apps. Three themes emerged: Technical, Content Quality, and Political. The political discourse in reviews has intensified over the years, with notable spikes around election periods. Accusations of bias were found to correlate most strongly with lower app ratings. The findings provide alarming empirical evidence for the politicization of non-political spaces, such as the app reviews section on app stores. With identity politics on the rise, this study sheds light on the importance of considering non-political online spaces for the study of political discourse.

Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify "thematic personas" (i.e., accounts that consistently share the same topics), we analyzed the ways in which each discussed vaccines. Results. We found differences in volume and valence of vaccine-related tweets among 9 thematic personas. Pro-Trump personas were more likely to express antivaccine sentiment. Anti-Trump personas expressed support for vaccination. Others offered a balanced valence, talked about vaccines neutrally, or did not tweet about vaccines. Conclusions. IRA-operated accounts discussed vaccines in manners consistent with fabricated US identities. Public Health Implications. IRA accounts discussed vaccines online in ways that evoked political identities. This could exacerbate recently emerging partisan gaps relating to vaccine misinformation, as differently valenced messages were targeted at different segments of the US public. These sophisticated targeting efforts, if repeated and increased in reach, could reduce vaccination rates and magnify health disparities.

Romantic comedies have long been understood to create unrealistic views of relationships. In the current study, we tested theory-driven corrective strategies for counteracting potentially harmful beliefs about romantic relationships. In an online experiment ( N = 626), participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: to a no exposure control, to watch a romantic comedy scene without correction, to read a corrective article before viewing, or to read a corrective article before viewing and complete a counterarguing exercise after viewing. Results showed that both corrective treatments significantly reduced romantic belief endorsement. We also investigated narrative engagement factors as mediators of these effects. Media enjoyment, realism of specific scenes, and overall movie realism each mediated the effect of corrections on romantic belief endorsement. Our findings suggest theory-driven corrective strategies are effective for reducing idealistic beliefs associated with entertainment media and highlight key persuasive variables for future interventions.

We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan's participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 ( N = 163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The containment frame emphasized strategies used to stop COVID-19's spread in Taiwan. The geopolitics frame described China's use of its international power to exclude Taiwan from the World Health Organization. The international cooperation frame emphasized Taiwan's ability and efficacy to contribute to the global efforts to slow down COVID-19. These results extend our understanding of hashtag activism by examining the intersection of geopolitics and global health crises. We introduce the theoretical concept of a mutually beneficial coalition, one that points to detrimental impacts of oppression on both the oppressed and the allies who are asked to help.

How did the four crises of 2020 -- the COVID - 19 pandemic, the economic collapse, the national reckoning over racial justice, and the challenges to the legitimacy of the 2020 election itself (abetted by conspiracy theories) -- shape the election, its aftermath, and perceptions of the assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021? Kathleen Hall Jamieson collaborated with top scholars to survey over 9,000 Americans for their reaction to these unparalleled events. Unmatched in its analytical rigor, Democracy Amid Crises will be the authoritative account of this unprecedented election and its tumultuous aftermath.

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