Chris Wells

Police violence against Black Americans is a persistent crisis characterized by volatile cycles of public attention, often sparked by high-profile incidents. Sustained focus is essential for systemic change, yet a fragmented media landscape overlooks most incidents. This study investigates the mechanisms behind this volatility by analyzing how the use of victims’ names facilitates symbolic prototyping and alters news framing dynamics. Replicating and extending prior research, we examine coverage from 2019 to 2024 using Global Data on Events, Location and Tone (GDELT)’s Global Knowledge Graph. Results show pronounced but short-lived surges in news volume and thematic framing following the deaths of George Floyd and Daunte Wright. Although these events triggered a thematic shift, framing was anchored almost exclusively to their names, suggesting that they functioned as symbolic prototypes for subsequent incidents. Our results prompt reconsideration of the issue-attention cycle in a digital-first media environment. They also challenge previous conceptualizations of thematic framing and key events.

Confronting severe economic challenges in the twenty-first century, many news media are forging new relationships with advertisers, including the focus of this study: native advertising. At the same time, as the climate crisis worsens, and political pressures and news coverage increase, we are seeing the fossil fuel industry expand and shift its communication about the topic. This study sits at the intersection of these trends: we ask to what extent, and how, native advertisements are being employed in fossil fuel communication campaigns. We analyze 252 native ads sponsored by fossil fuel companies between 2014 and 2022 in leading English-language news outlets. Led by human quantitative content analysis, with supplementary automated text analysis, we show that the style of climate science denial documented by, for example, Oreskes and Conway, is absent from native ad communications; in its place are frequent mentions of the environment, the reality of climate change, and the need to decarbonize. In fact, the primary position of fossil fuel companies in our data is the assertion that they are leading the decarbonization of energy systems. To do so, they strongly emphasize the relative virtues of natural gas and promote investments in unproven new technologies. A secondary tactic emphasizes the importance of energy to development and quality of life. Our discussion explores the challenges of analyzing claims that are often superficially true but misleading in context and the questions misleading native advertising raises for news media in a challenging digital media landscape.

Automated soft moderation systems are unable to ascertain if a post supports or refutes a false claim, resulting in a large number of contextual false positives. This limits their effectiveness, for example undermining trust in health experts by adding warnings to their posts or resorting to vague warnings instead of granular fact-checks, which result in desensitizing users. In this paper, we propose to incorporate stance detection into existing automated soft-moderation pipelines, with the goal of ruling out contextual false positives and providing more precise recommendations for social media content that should receive warnings. We develop a textual deviation task called Contrastive Textual Deviation (CTD) and show that it outperforms existing stance detection approaches when applied to soft moderation.We then integrate CTD into the stateof-the-art system for automated soft moderation Lambretta, showing that our approach can reduce contextual false positives from 20% to 2.1%, providing another important building block towards deploying reliable automated soft moderation tools on social media.

Gen Zers around the world have grown up and come of age in a period rife with the implications of climate change, heightened right-wing extremism, threats to democracy, and rising inflation. Gen Z has also been characterized by an enhanced awareness of mental health care and body positivity, LGBTQIA+ and the spectrum of gender identity, as well as racial justice, diversity, equity and inclusion. Our previous chapter (Chapter 11) on youth political engagement focused on digital media’s role in shaping engagement modes. In this chapter, we first explore shifts in the basis for civic identity for many young people beginning with the role of socio-economic status and affinity groups. Then we draw attention to skills, online practices, and the definition of political engagement. Lastly, we discuss what these changes imply for the study of political socialization and the practice of civic education.

In the US and much of the developed world, Gen Z faces significant challenges such as climate change, racial inequality, and economic precarity. Though this emerging generation faces significant challenges, digital media is invaluable for engaging with public life. In this chapter, we will focus on changing civic identities of citizens in industrialized democracies and digital media’s role in shaping engagement modes. First, we touch on news consumption, followed by the practices and patterns emerging as formal political campaigns attempt to reach young people through digital media. Second, we will highlight how content creation and interaction in digital media enables, for some young citizens, a form of cultural engagement that pushes the boundaries of the political. This chapter provides a base for additional discussion on Gen Z and civic engagement, the role of socio-economic status and social identity, online practices, socialization, and civic education in Chapter 12.

[Abstract] The dysfunctions of American political media and their contributions to the erosion of modern democracy are actively being debated. In this light, there has been considerable empirical inquiry dedicated to understanding the role of narratives, storytelling, and the mythical “deep story” in the mobilization of the electorate. Here we seek to understand how narratives are employed by news outlets to make sense of media spectacles. We focus on coverage of the April 23, 2020 White House COVID-19 Task Force press briefing, during which President Donald Trump debated the effectiveness of sunlight and disinfectant injections in combating the virus. We conducted a qualitative analysis of all relevant articles, cable news coverage on this topic by CNN and Fox News, and Facebook posts on this topic issued by six media outlets from April 23, 2020, to April 26, 2020–a total of 115 articles, 87 television segments, and 41 Facebook posts. Our results reveal a reliance on several narratives in both the left- and right-wing media systems. These narratives all contribute to the overarching frames that are spun in ways that sow distrust and resentment throughout audiences across the partisan spectrum.

Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies. Vaccari, C. & Valeriani, A. (2021). New York: Oxford University Press, $27.95 paperback, 287 pages. Social media as moderating forces in political communication? You may be forgiven for finding the idea outlandish, following years of hate speech and harassment, the polarizing effects of engagement-seeking algorithms, and mis- and disinformation circulating on social media platforms. Yet in Outside the Bubble, Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani offer a powerful case—and present compelling multinational evidence—that when it comes to political participation, social media may do more to mitigate differences than reinforce them. The book’s motivating observation is that for most citizens, most of the time, social media are not media of political communication. Moreover, for the preponderance of citizens, it is the lifeworld-rooted Facebook, and not the more explicitly political Twitter, that forms the core of social media experience. This...

This study investigates how successful Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts constructed the followings that were central to their disinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Treating an account’s social media following as both an ego network and an audience critical for information diffusion and influence accrual, we situate IRA Twitter accounts’ accumulation of followers in the ideologically polarized, attention driven, and asymmetric political communication system. Results show that partisan enclaves on Twitter contributed to IRA accounts’ followings through retweeting; and that mainstream and hyperpartisan media assisted conservative IRA accounts’ following gain by embedding their tweets in news. These results illustrate how network dynamics within social media and news media amplification beyond it together boosted social media followings. Our results also highlight the dynamics fanning the flames of disinformation: partisan polarization, media fragmentation and asymmetry, and an attention economy optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.

A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing networked digital media and an implicitly global information order. We contend that geographic place still provides a powerful grounding for individuals’ lifeworld experiences, identities, and orientations to political communications and politics. Focusing on the U.S. state of Wisconsin, and presenting data gathered in 2018, this study demonstrates significant, though often small, differences between geographic locations in terms of their patterns of media consumption, political talk, and anti-elite attitudes. Importantly, television news continues to play a major role in citizens’ repertoires across locations, suggesting we must continue to pay attention to this broadcast medium. Residents of more metropolitan communities consume significantly more national and international news from prestige sources such as the New York Times , and their talk networks are more cleanly sorted by partisanship. Running against common stereotypes of news media use, residents of small towns and rural areas consume no more conservative media than other citizens, even without controlling for partisanship. Our theoretical model and empirical results call for further attention to the intersections of place and politics in understanding news consumption behaviors and the meanings citizens draw from media content.

Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward “others,” bias against elites in favor of “the people,” and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication is based on analysis of candidate pronouncements, the verbal message conveyed at political events and over social media, rather than transgressive performances—the visual and tonal markers of outrage—that give populism its distinctive flair. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by using detailed verbal, tonal, and nonverbal coding of the first US presidential debate of 2016 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to show how Trump’s transgressive style—his violation of normative boundaries, particularly those related to protocol and politeness, and open displays of frustration and anger—can be operationalized from a communication standpoint and used in statistical modeling to predict the volume of Twitter response to both candidates during the debate. Our findings support the view that Trump’s norm-violating transgressive style, a type of political performance, resonated with viewers significantly more than Clinton’s more controlled approach and garnered Trump substantial second-screen attention.