Is Facebook driving tabloidization?

Magin, Melanie; Steiner, Miriam; Häuptli, Andrea; Stark, Birgit; Udris, Linards; Conboy, Martin; Eldridge, Scott A.

doi:10.4324/9780429320880-4

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…On social media, editors depart from the traditional text norms and add subjective views (Hågvar, 2019) or highlight surprise and emotions (Peterson-Salahuddin and Diakopoulos, 2020). Therefore, news outlet’s social media teasers are more tabloid-like (Magin et al, 2021) and include emojis and more question marks (Haim et al, 2021) than news on their websites. Peterson-Salahuddin and Diakopoulos (2020) conclude that social media editors constantly negotiate newsworthiness with interaction worthiness to be promoted through curation algorithms.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clickbait news and algorithmic curation: A game theory framework of the relation between journalism, users, and platforms

Lischka

Garz

2021

New Media & Society

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Algorithmic curation of social media platforms is considered to create a clickbait media environment. Although clickbait practices can be risky especially for legacy news outlets, clickbait is widely applied. We conceptualize clickbait content supply as a revision game with an unknown threshold. Combining supervised machine learning with time series analysis of Facebook posts and Twitter messages of 37 German legacy news outlets over 54 months, we observe outlets’ behavior following algorithm changes. Results reveal (1) an infrequent use of clickbait with few heavier-using outlets and (2) turning points of clickbait performance as clickbait supply and user interaction form a reversed U-shaped relationship. News outlets (3) collectively adjust toward an industry clickbait standard. While we (4) cannot prove that algorithmic curation increases clickbait, (5) Facebook’s regulative intervention to decrease clickbait disperses heterogeneous tendencies in clickbait supply. We contribute to an understanding of editorial decision-making in competitive environments facing platforms’ regulative intervention.

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