New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on Twitter (original) (raw)
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The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics
As the use of Twitter has become more commonplace throughout many nations, its role in political discussion has also increased. This has been evident in contexts ranging from general political discussion through local, state, and national elections (such as in the 2010 Australian elections) to protests and other activist mobilisation (for example in the current uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, as well as in the controversy around Wikileaks).
#ausvotes: How Twitter Covered the 2010 Australian Federal Election
While the 2007 Australian federal election was notable for the use of social media by the Australian Labor Party in campaigning, the 2010 election took place in a media landscape in which social media-especially Twitter-had become much more embedded in both political journalism and independent political commentary. This article draws on the computer-aided analysis of election-related Twitter messages, collected under the #ausvotes hashtag, to describe the key patterns of activity and thematic foci of the election's coverage in this particular social media site. It introduces novel metrics for analysing public communication via Twitter, and describes the related methods. What emerges from this analysis is the role of the #ausvotes hashtag as a means of gathering an ad hoc 'issue public'-a finding which is likely to be replicated for other hashtag communities.
Media scholars have called for more research to understand the consequences of news outlets becoming increasingly reliant on social media for sourcing stories, and how this is changing the nature of news and the role of the journalist. This also has high relevance for the Critical Discourse Analyst as regards processes of attributing the nature of ideology, where there is a shift away from stories derived from elite sources and official organizations. Using a sample of 26 news stories and a corpus of 40,000 tweets from a feed called #twowomentravel, which dealt with the journey of two women travelling from Ireland to the United Kingdom for an abortion, this paper uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the discourses from the feed are taken up by the journalists. Findings show an erosion of some of the basic former aspects of journalistic practice related to verification and provision of context as what is “trending” becomes a news definer. Yet those with the skills to understand how it is integrated into news production may use this to disseminate their own ideology.
Mapping networks of influence: tracking Twitter conversations through time and space
2015
The increasing use of social media around global news events, such as the London Olympics in 2012, raises questions for international broadcasters about how to engage with users via social media in order to best achieve their individual missions. Twitter is a highly diverse social network whose conversations are multi-directional involving individual users, political and cultural actors, athletes and a range of media professionals. In so doing, users form networks of influence via their interactions affecting the ways that information is shared about specific global events. This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organisations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events. We build an analysis around a set of tweets collected during the 2012 London Olympics. To understand how different users influence the conversations across Twitter, we compare three...
Axel Bruns, Patrik Wikström, Peta Mitchell, Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Lucy Resnyansky, Lucia Falzon This paper outlines a set of techniques for modelling information contagion in social media, drawing on comprehensive data on the network structure of and communicative activities in the Australian Twittersphere as the basis for the development of contagion simulation approaches. In doing so, we take into account two distinct aspects of information contagion on Twitter: • the formation of ad hoc publics that transcend existing follower structures (Bruns & Burgess, 2015), around topical hashtags such as #auspol (for Australian politics) or #sydneysiege (for the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis); • the existence of longer-term follower structures that determine the everyday flow of information between participating accounts, independent of hashtags. The paper draws on a comprehensive dataset describing the follower network structure between the 2.8 million accounts in the entire Australian Twittersphere, first established in 2013 (Bruns et al., 2014) and updated again in 2016; and on the continuous tracking of public tweeting activity by these 2.8 million accounts through the TrISMA infrastructure (Bruns et al., 2016). We use these data to simulate the effects of a range of possible communication strategies on a network structure that accurately replicates the real-world Twitter follower network in Australia, with a focus especially on the area of crisis communication. This enables a range of modelling experiments that address two central questions: 1) the impact that targetting accounts with certain characteristics during the early phases of the crisis communication process has on the overall dissemination of emergency messages; and 2) the impact that using Twitter-specific communicative features – e.g. a topical hashtag – has on the dissemination of emergency messages. We compare results from these simulations with datasets collected from Twitter around a number of critical events, including the Brisbane floods and the Sydney siege. Although both these events may be described as “crises”, they are qualitatively different: the first event impacted on a large geographical area and on a large number of people, either as an actual or a potential threat; the second was located at a single point, and directly impacted only on a small number of people, but was the focus of attention for many who were located at a significant distance from the actual event location. The outcomes from this work provide both important new methodological impulses for the modelling of realistic information contagion processes in social media, and directly actionable insights into the specific processes of information contagion in crisis contexts within the Australian Twittersphere.
Political Discourses on Twitter: Networking Topics, Objects and People
Weller, K., Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Mahrt, M., & Puschmann C. (Ed.). Twitter and Society. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2013
From Ad Hoc Issue Publics to Discourse Communities: A Year of Public Debate on Twitter
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2020
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the concept of ad hoc issue publics, through a mixed-methods analysis of a year of debate over a contentious topic in the Australian public sphere. Following two controversial racial discrimination cases in 2016, a number of Australian conservative politicians called for amendments to a specific section of the Racial Discrimination Act (Section 18C), which they claimed restricted freedom of speech. Similar proposals had been put forward and shelved in 2013. The issue was discussed widely on Twitter and other social media platforms. Eventually, the Australian Senate voted down changes to section 18C. Using a range of network analyses, examining the various network structures created by Twitter’s affordances, this study identifies the publics and communities involved in the debate. The discourses of these communities are then qualitatively analysed. The findings show that different—and sometimes antagonistic—discourse communities are i...
Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere
This paper reports on a research program that has developed new methodologies for mapping the Australian blogosphere and tracking how information is disseminated across it. We improve on conventional Web crawling methodologies in a number of significant ways: First, we track blogging activity as it occurs, by scraping new blog posts when such posts are announced through RSS feeds. Second, we utilise custom-made tools that distinguish between the different types of content and thus allow us to analyse only the salient discursive content provided by bloggers. Finally, we are able to examine these better-quality data by using both link network mapping and textual analysis tools, to produce both cumulative longer-term maps of interlinkages and themes, and specific shorter-term snapshots of current activity which indicate current clusters of heavy interlinkage and highlight their key themes.
#rescatemineros: global media events in the microblogging age.
Contemporary media events are experienced within the complex scenario of convergence media. Broadcasting channels and traditional mass media coexist with online digital news channels and with countless social media services. This paper describes how a global media event (the rescue operation of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days between August and October 2010) can be observed through the communication occurred inside Twitter, the largest microblogging platform. The article proposes a data-driven methodology that, starting from a large data acquisition procedure, is used to investigate: a) what communication patterns emerged within the microblogging sites; and b) how relevant information is propagated through the microblogging network of users.