Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns
Summary
Using millions of tweets from thousands of users, Mossaab Bagdouri was able to conduct what was perhaps the most ambitious and thorough analysis of journalists on Twitter to date. Overall, the University of Maryland professor found that the official news organizations often share links to their own stories, whereas individual journalists seek out engagement with other users more directly. Lastly, Bagdouri found that language barriers may also shape the online behaviors of these journalists — whether dividing or unifying.
Reflection
As an avid Twitter user, I didn’t find many of Bagdouri’s results to be extremely surprising. For example, it was mentioned extensively that professional accounts were less likely to retweet other posts or to engage with other users. From a practical standpoint, this makes sense. The more an organization posts or responds, the more chances there are to mess up.
A retweet from an official, certified account is almost always considered an endorsement of (1) the opinion of the post and (2) the creator of the post. In the realm of Twitter, retweeting from an official account is very dangerous due to the community’s critical culture. In this realm, many individuals must walk on eggshells in order to avoid getting “canceled,” or rejected, by the active community of Twitter.
Furthermore, engaging in comments on Twitter will often descend into heated arguments. Someone could easily reply with benevolent intentions and find themselves in an argument about racial inequalities within an hour of the post. From a public relations standpoint, replying to comments on Twitter would almost never result in a positive interaction for the brand. Thus, companies would obviously be less likely to interact directly with the community than an individual journalist.
Further Questions
- What would happen if we considered that some of the “news consumers” were also journalists rather than disregarding that fact?
- How would the data look:
- with a survey of a larger amount of countries, spanning the same language?
- with a survey of journalists within the same country, but that speak different languages (perhaps within the United States)?
- if we also included other forms of journalism, such as YouTube?
- if we separated the accounts based on whether they were verified?
- What would the overall sentiment analysis of journalists vs. organizations look like?
- Could we map a political graph (liberal vs. moderate vs. conservative) by looking at an organization’s most commonly mentioned terms, the other accounts its consumers follow, etc.? Using this map, could we predict a user’s political affiliations only by looking at who they follow on Twitter?
