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Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We analyze over 2.3 million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similarity in trends of discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the users involved in this conversation and what roles they played. We study how roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the upheaval. This analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly intertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in individual behavior.

The Internet has become impossible to ignore in the past two years. Even people who do not own a computer and have no opportunity to "surf the net" could not have missed the news stories about the Internet, many of which speculate about its effects on the ever-increasing number of people who are on line. Why, then, have communications researchers, historically concerned with exploring the effects of mass media, nearly ignored the Internet? With 25 million people estimated to be communicating on the Internet, should communication researchers now consider this network of networks' a mass medium? Until recently, mass communications researchers have overlooked not only the Internet but the entire field of computer-mediated communication, staying instead with the traditional forms of broadcast and print media that fit much more conveniently into models for appropriate research topics and theories of mass communication.However, this paper argues that if mass communications researchers continue to largely disregard the research potential of the Internet, their theories about communication will become less useful. Not only will the discipline be left behind, it will also miss an opportunity to explore and rethink answers to some of the central questions of mass communications research, questions that go to the heart of the model of source-message-receiver with which the field has struggled. This paper proposes a conceptualization of the Internet as a mass medium, based on revised ideas of what constitutes a mass audience and a mediating technology. The computer as a new communication technology opens a space for scholars to rethink assumptions and categories, and perhaps even to find new insights into traditional communication technologies.tion as a whole, in order to place the new medium within the context of other mass media. Mass media researchers have traditionally organized themselves around a specific communications medium. The newspaper, for instance, is a more precisely defined area of interest than printing-pressmediated communi-This paper looks at the Internet, rather than computer-mediated communica-'For a discussion of what the Internet is, see Request for Comment 1492 athttp:// yoyo.cc.monash.edu/au/-mist/Folklore/RFCl462.html. The "network of networks" description is taken from Krol, 1992. Merrill Morris is a doctoral candidate in the School

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The goal of this study is to determine the possible factors leading to increased anti-Muslim sentiment or Islamophobia in a comparative examination of public opinion in the United States and Europe. Secondary analyses of data from the 2008 Pew Global Attitude Project and the 2010 Pew News Interest Index, allow us to assess the role of religious practice, news interest and political affiliation in the attitudes toward Muslim minorities in several countries. Predictors of anti-Muslim attitudes include being politically more conservative and being older in all countries, and paying close attention to news coverage of the Park51 Islamic Community Center in the United States (which was proposed to be built near Ground Zero in New York). In France, but not in the other countries of the study, the importance of the respondents' religion was positively related to anti-Muslim attitudes.

Migration was one of the most important issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While Hillary Clinton promised an immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship, Donald Trump said he would deport illegal aliens, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and suspend immigration from countries with a history of terrorism, capitalizing on some of the public’s fears through his rhetoric. We examine the ways mainstream national and regional press covered this issue from the Republican National Convention through Election Day. This content analysis of 12 news outlets finds that political themes drove the coverage more than anything else, with Donald Trump or a member of his team most often serving as theme sponsor. Though about half of the stories were neutral or balanced in tone, negative stories were sponsored either by the Trump team or other actors.

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