Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media
https://journalqd.org/
<p>The journal publishes quantitative descriptive social science. It does not publish research that makes causal claims. The journal focuses on evidence that speaks to some substantive question or trend about digital communication processes and media. Articles can use a variety of data types and methods.</p>University of Zurichen-USJournal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2673-8813Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Online News Consumption during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic
https://journalqd.org/article/view/3318
<p>Using an original survey covering 17 countries, this paper documents the prevalence of beliefs in conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and characterizes the informational, demographic, and trust profiles of individuals who believe them. There is considerable variation across countries in the level of conspiracy beliefs, with people in a set of countries like Romania, Poland, Greece, and Hungary being relatively more susceptible than respondents in Northern Europe. We find several factors are correlated with conspiracy beliefs across countries. Relative to respondents who do not read news on social media, social media users tend to endorse more conspiracies, and this is the case for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube users in particular. We also observe a link between distrust in medical experts or government and endorsement of conspiracy theories in most countries. In a subset of countries, we also find individuals with medium level of education and those who are younger to believe in a higher number of conspiracy theories. </p>Soyeon JinJan ZilinskyFranziska PradelYannis Theocharis
Copyright (c) 2024 Soyeon Jin, Jan Zilinsky, Franziska Pradel, Yannis Theocharis
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-03-132024-03-13410.51685/jqd.2024.008Death of a Platform?
https://journalqd.org/article/view/4247
<p>While a series of case studies have provided useful insights into the political uses of Twitter, scholars have pointed to the necessity for longitudinal and cross-country findings in order to further our understanding of social media use in this regard. The study at hand presents a comparative analysis of Scandinavian political party communication on Twitter. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the study details the full histories of party Twitter accounts from Denmark, Norway and Sweden in order to provide overarching, structural insights into how the studied political parties have made use of Twitter – but also how their potential voters have chosen to engage with the tweets posted by the parties. While Twitter once was described as integral for political campaigning and indeed for the hybrid media systems in these countries, the results indicate an overall declining trend when it comes to use - albeit an increase of what could be considered as less demanding types of use for parties and citizens alike. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed.</p>Anders Olof Larsson
Copyright (c) 2024 Anders Olof Larsson
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-01-142024-01-14410.51685/jqd.2024.006Detecting Misinformation: Identifying False News Spread by Political Leaders in the Global South
https://journalqd.org/article/view/4135
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>We provide and examine an approach for detecting false stories that circulate as text and without hyperlinks, which are commonly found in the Global South. Our text-based approach relies on a combination of false stories identified by fact-checkers, supervised learning methods, natural language processing, and human review. We contrast our approach with the established domain-based and with Facebook’s URL approaches by applying them in the case of Brazilian <span style="font-size: 0.875rem; font-family: 'Noto Sans', 'Noto Kufi Arabic', -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;">political leaders. The results show that sharing false news by politicians is a rare event: less than 1% of political leaders’ social media posts contain misinformation. However, we find little overlap across the approaches. The text-based approach leads to different conclusions about which politicians share misinformation and the type of false content shared, while demographic and political predictors of misinformation-sharing behavior are typically similar across approaches. Our approach produces fewer false positives than other approaches and only a small number of false negatives. Our results show that the text-based approach is an important complement to the dominant approaches as it is more effective at detecting false news.</span></p> </div> </div> </div>Valerie WirtschafterFrederico Batista PereiraNatália BuenoNara PavãoJo˜ao Pedro Oliveira dos SantosFelipe Nunes
Copyright (c) 2024 Valerie Wirtschafter, Frederico Batista Pereira, Natália Bueno, Nara Pavão, Jo˜ao Pedro Oliveira dos Santos, Felipe Nunes
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-01-312024-01-31410.51685/jqd.2024.007"I always feel like somebody's watching me"
https://journalqd.org/article/view/3569
<p>The practice of political micro-targeting (PMT) – tailoring messages for voters based on their personal data – has increased over the past two decades, particularly in the U.S. Studies of PMT have to date concentrated largely on its effects on voters, or its implications for democracy more broadly. Less attention has been given to answering basic descriptive questions about how people perceive, feel and care about this new mode of political communication. This paper fills that gap by reporting findings from an online survey (weighted to be nationally representative on age, gender, ethnicity, region and past vote) that measured public attitudes toward PMT during the 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign. Specifically, we measure voter orientations toward PMT in four key dimensions – awareness, aversion, knowledge, and acceptability at the aggregate level – and explore how these vary according to a range of individual characteristics. Key findings are that public understanding and acceptance of PMT may be higher than current studies indicate, particularly among certain sectors of the population. Such insights are important for academic research to cognize and also policy-makers, as they move toward greater regulation of voter targeting.</p>Rachel GibsonEsmeralda BonKathryn Dommett
Copyright (c) 2024 Rachel Gibson, Esmeralda Bon, Kate Dommett
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-01-012024-01-01410.51685/jqd.2024.001Proud Boys on Telegram
https://journalqd.org/article/view/4187
<p align="justify"><span lang="en-US">Utilizing an original data set of public Telegram channels affiliated with a right-wing extremist group, the Proud Boys, we conduct an exploratory analysis of the structure and nature of the group’s presence on the platform. Our study considers the group’s growth, organizational structure, connectedness with other far-right and/or fringe factions, and the range of topics discussed on this alternative social media platform. The findings show that the Proud Boys have a notable presence on Telegram, with a discernable spike in activity coinciding with Facebook’s and Instagram’s 2018 deplatforming of associated pages and profiles with this and other extremist groups. Another sharp increase in activity is then precipitated by the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. By February 2022, we identified 92 public Telegram channels explicitly affiliated with the Proud Boys, which constitute the core of a well-connected network with 131,953 subscribers. These channels, primarily from the United States, also include international presences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and Germany. Our data reveals substantial </span><span lang="en-US">interaction between the Proud Boys and other fringe and/or far-right communities on Telegram, including MAGA Trumpists, QAnon, COVID-19-related misinformation, and white-supremacist communities. Content analyses of this network highlights several prominent and recurring themes, including opposition to feminism and liberals, skepticism toward official information sources, and propagation of various conspiracy beliefs. This study offers the first systematic examination of the Proud Boys on Telegram, illuminating how a far-right extremist group leverages the latitude afforded by a relatively unregulated alternative social media platform.</span></p>Wei ZhongCatie BailardDavid BroniatowskiRebekah Tromble
Copyright (c) 2024 Wei Zhong, Catie Bailard, David Broniatowski, Rebekah Tromble
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-01-082024-01-08414710.51685/jqd.2024.003@Who? Investigating Possible Errors in Studies Linking Survey and Twitter Data
https://journalqd.org/article/view/4042
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>Expanding global usage of social media and growing questions about its societal impact have led scholars to investigate the relationship between individuals' offline and online behaviors and characteristics. Such inquiries, which compare individuals' survey responses to their social media behavior, typically do not address whether the elicitation of survey respondents' social media information introduces any systematic errors. However, making inferences from a survey-linked sample to a social media platform, and finally to a survey sample or broader target population, can be imperiled when systematic differences exist between those who provide and those who deny researchers access to their social media accounts. In this paper, we ask: Do survey respondents who say they use Twitter differ from the subset providing validated Twitter handles, as well as from the overall survey sample? Pooling across five datasets and over 31,000 respondents, we show first that samples of stated Twitter users differ from the initial survey samples from which they are drawn on several socio-demographic characteristics. Second and reassuringly as concerns possible errors due to survey-linkage, we report few systematic differences between those who say they use Twitter and those who provide validated Twitter handles. Nevertheless, we do document differences on some demographics, and we illustrate how errors could carry potential consequences for sample composition of which researchers should be aware. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of our results, their possible generalizability, and areas for future research.</p> </div> </div> </div>Marten AppelNicholas Haas
Copyright (c) 2024 Marten Appel, Nicholas Haas
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2024-01-192024-01-19410.51685/jqd.2024.002