Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries
On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors' Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on 'salient' and 'owned' issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how users' receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More…
Is Facebook driving tabloidization?
In highly commercialized media markets, newspapers must be present on social media whose logic favours user engagement, shareworthiness, and virality. This might foster increasingly tabloid-like reporting, but empirical studies on the actual effects on newspaper content are widely lacking. We investigate how far newspaper type (quality paper vs. tabloid) and distribution channel (print version, website, Facebook page) influences the degree of tabloidization of two newspapers’ political news. In a content analysis of political news articles of FAZ and BILD in their print versions, on their websites, and on their Facebook pages (n=2,441), we measure tabloidization on three dimensions (topic, …
Campaigning in the fourth age of political communication. A multi-method study on the use of Facebook by German and Austrian parties in the 2013 national election campaigns
Starting from the contribution to the discussion on a fourth age of political communication, here we argue that, as a consequence of how the Web 2.0 has changed political campaigns, the theoretical...
sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211026595 - Supplemental material for Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211026595 for Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda by Melanie Magin, Stefan Geiß, Birgit Stark and Pascal Jürgens in The International Journal of Press/Politics
Loopholes in the Echo Chambers: How the Echo Chamber Metaphor Oversimplifies the Effects of Information Gateways on Opinion Expression
Social media (SM) are often regarded drivers of personalized echo chambers in which only ideas resonante that individuals already hold, leading to more extreme opinions and intensified opinion expression. However, recent theorizing and evidence has cast doubts on the universal applicability of the echo chamber metaphor, pointing out that communication effects on opinion expression are much more complex than the metaphor suggests. Using the refugee crisis in Germany as a background, the current study challenges four implicit premises of the echo chamber metaphor empirically. The findings show a more complex picture than the metaphor implies: (1) Ignoring other information sources beyond SM m…
sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211026595 - Supplemental material for Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211026595 for Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda by Melanie Magin, Stefan Geiß, Birgit Stark and Pascal Jürgens in The International Journal of Press/Politics
Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda
The diversification of information sources has reignited the controversy on media-induced fragmentation endangering social integration. The media's capability to set the public agenda and create issues as a common core is a pivotal part of the public sphere and contributes fundamentally to society's cohesion. Algorithm-driven sources like social media that personalize content to the preferences of individuals and their social networks are considered agents of fragmentation of the public sphere. Politically extreme individuals relying on them may be particularly vulnerable to losing touch with society's common core. We employ an innovative operationalization of fragmentation on the individu…
Reaching Out to the Europeans. Political Parties’ Facebook Strategies of Issue Ownership and the Second-Order Character of European Election Campaigns
The European Election campaign 2019 enjoyed heightened attention in the European and global public due to the recent emergence of populist actors, new parties, and large European issues such as immigration, climate change, and Brexit. Starting theoretically from the issue ownership theory, shareworthiness, and the second-order character of European elections, the study at hand investigates the campaigns of 69 parties from 9 countries on Facebook as one of the current central spheres of electoral contest. Facebook enables parties to provide users with selected issues considered advantageous for themselves. The number of posts’ shares indicates whether the parties manage to reach out to the v…
Uneasy Bedfellows. Comparing the Diversity of German Public Service News on Television and on Facebook
News consumption has shifted increasingly to new platforms and gateways such as social network sites (SNS) with Facebook leading the way. Accordingly, journalists must cope with this “uneasy bedfellow” and provide news on Facebook to attract otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. This is even more relevant for public service broadcasters (PSBs), whose mission is to serve the interests and needs of every citizen. Bound to their public service mission, PSBs have to generally fulfill specific normative requirements such as diversity within their coverage, particularly to a higher degree than their commercial counterparts. Consequently, these requirements should be transferred to public service onl…
Shades of Mediatization
This study investigates mediatization of campaign coverage of German and Austrian elite newspapers from 1949 to 2009. With a cross-national perspective on a sixty-year time span, it is well suited to examine the long-term development of mediatization. It focuses on news media logic and its components that have not been satisfyingly investigated by empirical research yet. In Step 1, the study empirically identifies three components of media logic: partisanship, personalization, and detachment from policy. In Step 2, it presents evidence that these components are largely invariant between the two countries, seven newspapers, and four time intervals investigated, pointing to the institutional…
Information Greater than Mobilisation Greater than Interaction: Contours of a Pan-European Style of Social Media Campaigning
This chapter compares the Facebook campaigns of 90 political parties aggregated by the political groups in the EP to which they belong from 12 countries in the 2019 EP election. Based on these results we identify the contours of a pan-European style of social media campaigning that can be described as follows: national contexts dominated and framed the EP elections. In comparison to the three key functions of election campaigns, parties place the most importance by far on information in their use of social media. Calls for mobilisation play a certain role, while the parties seem hardly interested in interactions. The ongoing neglect of social media’s interactive potential in politics calls …
Supplemental Material, Jurgens_online_supplement - Two Half-Truths Make a Whole? On Bias in Self-Reports and Tracking Data
Supplemental Material, Jurgens_online_supplement for Two Half-Truths Make a Whole? On Bias in Self-Reports and Tracking Data by Pascal Jürgens, Birgit Stark, and Melanie Magin in Social Science Computer Review
Campaigning for Strasbourg on Facebook: Introduction to a 12-Country Comparison on Parties’ Facebook Campaigns in the 2019 European Parliament Election
European Parliament (EP) elections provide an ideal context for comparative studies on the communication strategies of political parties at national and European level. The 2019 EP election campaign allows analysing how the different political parties use Facebook to inform, interact with and mobilise voters. The study of the electoral campaign also enables the identification of differences and similarities between countries and between parties. This chapter introduces an edited volume that presents results of a quantitative content analysis of more than 12,000 Facebook posts published by political parties from 12 European countries in the last four weeks before the 2019 EP election. It des…
Two Half-Truths Make a Whole? On Bias in Self-Reports and Tracking Data
The pervasive use of mobile information technologies brings new patterns of media usage, but also challenges to the measurement of media exposure. Researchers wishing to, for example, understand the nature of selective exposure on algorithmically driven platforms need to precisely attribute individuals’ exposure to specific content. Prior research has used tracking data to show that survey-based self-reports of media exposure are critically unreliable. So far, however, little effort has been invested into assessing the specific biases of tracking methods themselves. Using data from a multimethod study, we show that tracking data from mobile devices is linked to systematic distortions in sel…
Maßlos überschätzt. Ein Überblick über theoretische Annahmen und empirische Befunde zu Filterblasen und Echokammern
Seit einigen Jahren sind zwei einpragsame Metaphern im offentlichen und wissenschaftlichen Diskurs allgegenwartig – Filterblasen und Echokammern. Beide beschreiben plakativ die Gefahr, dass Menschen sich in eine Welt zuruckziehen oder in sie befordert werden, in der sie nur noch Themen, die sie interessieren, und Meinungen, die sie selbst vertreten, zur Kenntnis nehmen (mussen). Bei der Entstehung solcher Enklaven wird algorithmisch gesteuerten Informationsquellen (insbesondere sozialen Medien und Suchmaschinen) eine Schlusselrolle zugewiesen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Uberblick uber theoretische Annahmen und empirischen Forschungsstand zu Filterblasen und Echokammern. Er macht deutlich, dass …
More Relevant Today Than Ever: Past, Present and Future of Media Performance Research
Media performance is constitutive for functioning democracies. But what is the situation regarding media performance in the age of digitalisation? And how can media performance continue to be assured under the current difficult economic conditions for the news industry? In this essay, we give a short overview of how media performance research has developed from the introduction of private broadcasting to the spread of the Internet and social media. In the course of this development, the initial focus of media performance research on media content has broadened to include media quality from the user perspective. We show how the contributions to this thematic issue relate with existing lines …
Quellen historischer Forschung in der Kommunikationswissenschaft
Quellen bilden die Grundlage jeglicher historischer Forschung. Ihre Auswahl hangt von der Fragestellung ab. Der Beitrag beginnt mit theoretischen Uberlegungen zum Umgang mit und zur Deutung von historischen Quellen, um dann auf drei Hauptkategorien historischer Quellen fur die Kommunikationswissenschaft naher einzugehen: Medien, archivalische Quellen sowie Menschen und deren Erinnerungsleistung.
Neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit durch Informationsintermediäre: Wie Facebook, Google & Co. die Medien und den Journalismus verändern
Der Begriff der Filterblase hat es in den Duden geschafft. Alle drei bis funf Jahre entscheidet die Duden-Redaktion uber die Aufnahme neuer Worter. In der aktualisierten Auflage, die im August 2017 erschienen ist, findet sich die Filterblase in den Bereichen «Technologisches» bzw.
Grassroots-Demokratie via Twitter?
„Was lange gart, wird endlich Wut.“Mit diesem umformulierten Sprichwort lasst sich die Entwicklung der Proteste um Stuttgart 21 (S21) treffend charakterisieren. Das Projekt ist eines der umstrittensten Verkehrs- und Stadtebauprojekte in Deutschland und beschaftigt die Bevolkerung – insbesondere die Stuttgarter Burger – seit Jahrzehnten: Zum einen soll der bestehende Kopfbahnhof in einen Durchgangsbahnhof sowie die Neubaustrecke zwischen Wendlungen und Ulm ausgebaut und zum anderen sollen durch die Umwandlung des Hauptbahnhofs freiwerdende Gleisstrecken stadtebaulich verandert werden. Bereits in den 1980er Jahren gab es hierzu erste Beratungen und Plane auf Bundes- und Landesebene. In einem …
Social Media as a Campaigning Tool in Elections: Theoretical Considerations and State of Research
To extend their reach to supporters and voters, three election campaign functions are key to political actors: information, interaction and mobilisation. We argue that these three functions are interrelated and function most successfully through interrelationship. Thus, the distinction between top-down and bottom-up communication appears to be rather artificial in the context of online campaigns. In campaign practice, both directions are rather closely linked. Our theoretical framework shows how Facebook can be used specifically to realise the three key functions and provides the background for the following chapters for analysing how political parties actually use Facebook in European Parl…
Seek and you shall find? A content analysis on the diversity of five search engines’ results on political queries
Search engines are important political news sources and should thus provide users with diverse political information ��� an important precondition of a well-informed citizenry. The search engines��� algorithmic content selection strongly influences the diversity of the content received by the users ��� particularly since most users highly trust search engines and often click on only the first result. A widespread concern is that users are not informed diversely by search engines, but how far this concern applies has hardly been investigated. Our study is the first to investigate content diversity provided by five search engines on ten current political issues in Germany. The findings show t…