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Digital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintain relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communication? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus "for old people", as especially young Internet users flock to Social Networking Sites (SNSs)? Cornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the question of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive impression on their constituents. - Digital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintain relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communication? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus "for old people", as especially young Internet users flock to Social Networking Sites (SNSs)? Cornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the question of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive impression on their constituents.

Our paper approaches Twitter through the lens of "platform politics" (Gillespie, 2010), focusing in particular on controversies around user data access, ownership, and control. We characterise different actors in the Twitter data ecosystem: private and institutional end users of Twitter, commercial data resellers such as Gnip and DataSift, data scientists, and finally Twitter, Inc. itself; and describe their conflicting interests. We furthermore study Twitter's Terms of Service and application programming interface (API) as material instantiations of regulatory instruments used by the platform provider and argue for a more promotion of data rights and literacy to strengthen the position of end users.

Computational methods offer a new perspective on the evolving agendas of right-wing movements and parties online. This article showcases computational approaches to text analysis (specifically so-called topic models) to diachronically investigate nativist right-wing issues in social media by comparing comments posted on the Facebook page of the Pegida movement to those of the Alternative for Germany. After describing topic modelling as an increasingly popular method and drawing on the literature on right-wing nativism online, we investigate a set of shared issues relevant to the mobilization of commentators, including opposition to Islam, migration, the government and the media. We furthermore show contrastively how issue prevalence differs between the two groups, and how issue shares change over time, in some instances converging on a shared nativist core. We close with a series of suggestions on the utility of computation content analysis for the study of rapidly evolving political agendas.

WikiEdits bots are a class of Twitter bot that announce edits made by Wikipedia users editing under government IP addresses, with the goal of making government editing activities more transparent. This article examines the characteristics and impact of transparency bots, bots that make visible the edits of institutionally affiliated individuals by reporting them on Twitter. We map WikiEdits bots and their relationships with other actors, analyzing the ways in which bot creators and journalists frame governments' participation in Wikipedia. We find that, rather than providing a neutral representation of government activity on Wikipedia, WikiEdits bots and the attendant discourses of the journalists that reflect the work of such bots construct a partial vision of government contributions to Wikipedia as negative by default. This has an impact on the public discourse about governments' role in the development of public information, a consequence that is distinct from the current discourses that characterize transparency bots.

Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts, this is the first book to document the various notions and concepts of Twitter communication, providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of current research into the uses of Twitter. It also presents methods for analyzing Twitter data.

Understanding how citizens keep themselves informed about current affairs is crucial for a functioning democracy. Extant research suggests that in an increasingly fragmented digital news environment, search engines and social media platforms promote more incidental, but potentially more shallow modes of engagement with news compared to the act of routinely accessing a news organization's website. In this study, we examine classic predictors of news consumption to explain the preference for three modes of news engagement in online tracking data: routine news use, news use triggered by social media, and news use as part of a general search for information. In pursuit of this aim, we make use of a unique data set that combines tracking data with survey data. Our findings show differences in predictors between preference for regular (direct) engagement, general search-driven, and social media-driven modes of news engagement. In describing behavioral differences in news consumption patterns, we demonstrate a clear need for further analysis of behavioral tracking data in relation to self-reported measures in order to further qualify differences in modes of news engagement.