Past work suggests that the priorities for information propagation in social media may be markedly different from the priorities for news selection in traditional media outlets. We explore this possibility here, focusing on the tone of both newspaper and Twitter content following changes in the U.S. unemployment rate, from 2008 to 2014. Results strongly support the expectation that while the tone of newspaper content exhibits stronger reactions to negative information, the tone of Twitter content reacts more strongly to positive economic shifts.
Public responsiveness to policy is contingent on there being a sufficient amount of clear and accurate information about policy available to citizens. It is of some significance then, that there are increasing concerns about limits being placed on media outlets around the world. We examine the impact of these limits on the public’s ability to respond meaningfully to policy by analyzing cross-national variation in the opinion–policy link. Using new measures on spending preferences from Wave 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, merged with OECD data on government spending and Freedom House measures of press freedom, we assess the role of mass media in facilitating public responsiveness. We find evidence that when media are weak, so too is public responsiveness to policy. These results highlight the critical role that accurate, unfettered media can play in modern representative democracy.
Facebook is an integral part of the American news environment. Substantial numbers of users now seek or encounter news on the platform and news organizations depend on the site to build audiences and drive traffic to their websites. At the same time, Facebook has also become a space for people to engage alternative sources of news and political information, including highly partisan and ideological sources. Yet we know relatively little about the types of news sources Americans engage with most frequently on the platform. In this study, we evaluate the scope of news and information sources on Facebook, including engagement with these sources. We analyse nearly 12 million Facebook posts from 416 news organizations between 2012 and 2017. We find that the sources that receive the most user engagement are often the most ideologically extreme. We also find that alternative outlets that are politically conservative frequently get more engagement, which may provide them an outsized presence on users' newsfeeds.
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