How do news consumers navigate social media when it comes to news? What are mechanisms of selection or avoidance? Also, what are mechanisms of news creation? Citizens’ news use on social media platforms has significant democratic implications.
The prominence of social media platforms in today’s hybrid media environment has made filtering and curating by learning algorithms central to understanding news creation and exposure. These algorithms have been a reason for increased concern about eroding journalistic norms, fake news, polarisation, filter bubbles, and news avoidance. At the moment we understand the algorithm as a linear construct or as frozen organisational discourse, and thereby do not fully capture the dynamic relationships between various social media actors.
In this project, we present a new framework conceptualising news creation and exposure on social media platforms as the product of a complex interplay between the algorithms and supply and demand side actors. Also, we empirically investigate how this interplay affect news exposure and the news creation, selection and avoidance mechanisms using a social media mock-up platform. A significant contribution of this project will be the development of a social media mock up platform.
Contact:
Rasmus Schmøkel , Ph.D. student (rws@sdu.dk)