News Engagement on Social Media and Democratic Citizenship: Direct and Moderating Roles of Curatorial News Use in Political Involvement

Abstract

Social media allow users not only to read news, but also to evaluate, reconstruct, and share it. This study conceptualizes curatorial news use via social media as an important news use behavior, which involves evaluating the existing news, adding new values by reconstructing it, and then sharing it with other social media users. An analysis of survey data from 650 South Korean adults shows that curatorial news use on social media has a significantly positive association with political knowledge, internal political efficacy, and offline and online political participation. The interaction of social media news use and curatorial news use is also significantly associated with high levels of political knowledge and political participation.

Does political efficacy equally predict news engagement across countries? A multilevel analysis of the relationship among internal political efficacy, media environment and news engagement

“…The recent discourse surrounding news engagement has been linked to scholarly discussion on citizenship in the digital age (Lee, 2015;Park and Kaye, 2018). News engagement, as part of the broad spectrum of civic engagement, offers rich opportunities for citizen conversations and interactions, and it has thus become an important conduit for people to actualize their citizenship.…”

“…Others pointed out that interactivity, embedded in consuming call-in televisions, requires one to hold high levels of self-efficacy to get involved (Newhagen, 1994). Internal political efficacy has been found as a strong predictor of online news consumption, such as news sharing, curational news use, and social media news engagement (Ha et al, 2018;Lee and Ma, 2012;Park and Kaye, 2018). These findings indicate that, when people feel that they understand public issues and they can influence the political processes, they are motivated to not only keep themselves updated about what is happening through news consumption but also inform others through news sharing and discussion.…”

“…For one, few studies adopt an appropriate approach to conceptualizing and measuring news engagement. Scholars either look at one particular news engagement activity, such as curational news use, and news sharing (Lee and Ma, 2012;Park and Kaye, 2018), or use a broad measurement that includes both active and passive news consumption behavior (Ha et al, 2018). For the other, recent research mainly focuses on individual-level predictors of news engagement, including internal political efficacy, news interest, and civic and information-seeking gratifications (Chan et al, 2018;Lee, 2015;Lee and Ma, 2012).…”

“…Specifically, we proposed a refined conceptualization of news engagement with three dimensions, including overall, user-user, and user-content news engagement to address the wide variety and the very nature of news engagement behavior. By expanding prior findings of a positive relationship between internal political efficacy and news engagement (Chan et al, 2018;Park and Kaye, 2018), we further sought to reveal how the contextual factors-press freedom and Internet penetration-account for news engagement through hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Our study provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between individual agency and media environment in shaping news engagement behavior.…”

Intensification of Democratic Practices and Informational Privileges of Political Elites in the Context of Social Media Development

“…Упрощая публичное выражение политических мнений и повышая уровень политической образованности, социальные медиа стимулируют политическую активность граждан, расширяя перечень доступных для них видов политического участия, что считается необходимым условием любой эффективно функционирующей демократии. При этом социальные медиа не только трансформируют традиционные виды, имеющие место в реальной жизни, но и генерируют абсолютно новую сферу политического онлайн-участия [13]. Онлайн-участие отличается от офлайнучастия по своим основополагающим механизмам.…”