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Online Media and the 2016 US Presidential Election
Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Faris, Robert M., Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017. Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33759251 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA AUGUST 2017 PARTISANSHIP, Robert Faris Hal Roberts PROPAGANDA, & Bruce Etling Nikki Bourassa DISINFORMATION Ethan Zuckerman Yochai Benkler Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is the result of months of effort and has only come to be as a result of the generous input of many people from the Berkman Klein Center and beyond. Jonas Kaiser and Paola Villarreal expanded our thinking around methods and interpretation. Brendan Roach provided excellent research assistance. Rebekah Heacock Jones helped get this research off the ground, and Justin Clark helped bring it home. We are grateful to Gretchen Weber, David Talbot, and Daniel Dennis Jones for their assistance in the production and publication of this study. This paper has also benefited from contributions of many outside the Berkman Klein community. The entire Media Cloud team at the Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab has been essential to this research. -
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog Lada A. Adamic Natalie Glance HP Labs Intelliseek Applied Research Center 1501 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 5001 Baum Blvd. Pittsburgh, PA 15217 [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT four internet users in the U.S. read weblogs, but 62% of them In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion still did not know what a weblog was. During the presiden- topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree tial election campaign many Americans turned to the Inter- of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to net to stay informed about politics, with 9% of Internet users uncover any differences in the structure of the two commu- saying that they read political blogs “frequently” or “some- times”2. Indeed, political blogs showed a large growth in nities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 “A-list” blogs 3 over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presiden- readership in the months preceding the election. tial Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to Recognizing the importance of blogs, several candidates one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they and political parties set up weblogs during the 2004 U.S. discussed, both within the liberal and conservative commu- Presidential campaign. Notably, Howard Dean’s campaign nities, and also across communities. We also study a single was particularly successful in harnessing grassroots support day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot using a weblog as a primary mode for publishing dispatches captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently from the candidate to his followers. -
Infographic by Ben Fry; Data by Technorati There Are Upwards of 27 Million Blogs in the World. to Discover How They Relate to On
There are upwards of 27 million blogs in the world. To discover how they relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days. Think of those links as votes in an endless global popularity poll. Many blogs vote for each other: “blogrolling.” Some top-50 sites don’t have any links from the others shown here, usually because they are big in Japan, China, or Europe—regions still new to the phenomenon. key tech politics gossip other gb2312 23. Fark gouy2k 13. Dooce huangmj 22. Kottke 24. Gawker 40. Xiaxue 2. Engadget 4. Daily Kos 6. Gizmodo 12. SamZHU para Blogs 41. Joystiq 44. nosz50j 3. PostSecret 29. Wonkette 39. Eschaton 1. Boing Boing 7. InstaPundit 17. Lifehacker 25. chattie555 com/msn-sa 14. Beppe Grillo 18. locker2man 27. spaces.msn. 34. A List Apart 37. Power Line 16. Herramientas 43. AMERICAblog 20. Think Progress 35. manabekawori 49. The Superficial 9. Crooks and Liars11. Michelle Malkin 28. lwhanz198153030. shiraishi31. The seesaa Space Craft 50. Andrew Sullivan 19. Open Palm! silicn 33. spaces.msn.com/ 45. Joel46. on spaces.msn.com/Software 5. The Huffington Post 8. Thought Mechanics 15. theme.blogfa.com 21. Official Google Blog 38. Weebl’s Stuff News 47. princesscecicastle 32. Talking Points Memo 48. Google Blogoscoped 42. Little Green Footballs 26. spaces.msn. c o m/ 36. spaces.msn.com/atiger 10. spaces.msn.com/klcintw 1. Boing Boing A herald from the 6. -
Bloggergate: How the CBS National Guard Story Affected Coverage of Webloggers
Bloggergate: How the CBS National Guard Story Affected Coverage of Webloggers A Research Paper Submitted for the INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ONLINE JOURNALISM By Dr. J. Richard Stevens Assistant Professor of Journalism Southern Methodist University P.O. Box 750113 Dallas, TX 75275 [email protected] Abstract: The controversy surrounding the CBS reportage of President George W. Bush’s National Guard service represented a defining moment in the relationship between amateur Webloggers and professional journalists. After weeks of controversy, CBS relented to the scathing criticism and granted the bloggers a major victory in what some have called a conflict between new and old media. But did these events change the way “old media” present “new media” in news coverage? A pilot study using content analysis techniques was conducted to analyze New York Times news stories from the 12 weeks before and after the September 8 broadcast to determine if any effects were observable and what implications these findings might indicate about the relationship between news media and bloggers. Introduction Since the founding of America, the press has traditionally served as a link between the public sphere and the private interests. In one of the classic definitions of role of journalists in American society, Walter Lippmann wrote in 1920: The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy.1 By raising issues and events into the public eye, journalists have provided a forum for critical debate and have granted the citizenry access to their government. -
Warblog Without End: Online Anti-Islamic Discourses As Persuadables Daniel Carl Munksgaard University of Iowa
University of Iowa Masthead Logo Iowa Research Online Theses and Dissertations Summer 2010 Warblog without end: online anti-Islamic discourses as persuadables Daniel Carl Munksgaard University of Iowa Copyright 2010 Daniel Carl Munksgaard This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/715 Recommended Citation Munksgaard, Daniel Carl. "Warblog without end: online anti-Islamic discourses as persuadables." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2010. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.xw414rni Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd Part of the Communication Commons WARBLOG WITHOUT END: ONLINE ANTI-ISLAMIC DISCOURSES AS PERSUADABLES by Daniel Carl Munksgaard An Abstract Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa July 2010 Thesis Supervisor: Assistant Professor Timothy Havens 1 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a critical discourse analysis of how anti-Islamic rhetoric in prominent online forums is articulated within the context of popular discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance. According to Melanie McAlister, perceptions of Muslims within the United States are unique in comparison to other minority groups in that they are almost entirely mediated, whether it is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, or the various Muhammad cartoon controversies. While much work has been done analyzing how Islam and Muslims are mediated in popular film and television, very little attention has been given to how these perspectives are mediated through the Internet. Using Erving Goffman’s theory of performativity and Kristine Fitch’s notion of persuadables, I examine how both prominent bloggers and pseudonymous commentators work in a “back stage” context to bring Islamophobic norms and premises within the sphere of acceptable opinions for the “front stage” of mainstream media discourses. -
Nieman Reports Fall 2005 Vol. 59 No. 3
NIEMAN REPORTS THE NIEMAN FOUNDATION FOR JOURNALISM AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY VOL. 59 NO. 3 FALL 2005 Five Dollars Covering Indian Country Journalist’s Trade Changing Newspapers, Changing News Comparing National and Local Campaign Coverage Words & Reflections War Photography to Opinion Journalism “… to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” —Agnes Wahl Nieman, the benefactor of the Nieman Foundation. Vol. 59 No. 3 NIEMAN REPORTS Fall 2005 THE NIEMAN FOUNDATION FOR JOURNALISM AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY Publisher Bob Giles Editor Melissa Ludtke Assistant Editor Lois Fiore Editorial Assistant Sarah Hagedorn Design Editor Diane Novetsky Nieman Reports (USPS #430-650) is published Editorial in March, June, September and December Telephone: 617-496-6308 by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, E-Mail Address: One Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-2098. [email protected] Subscriptions/Business Internet Address: Telephone: 617-496-2968 www.nieman.harvard.edu E-Mail Address: [email protected] Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Subscription $20 a year, $35 for two years; add $10 per year for foreign airmail. Single copies $5. Second-class postage paid at Boston, Back copies are available from the Nieman office. Massachusetts and additional entries. Please address all subscription correspondence to POSTMASTER: One Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-2098 Send address changes to and change of address information to Nieman Reports, P.O. Box 4951, Manchester, NH 03108. P.O. Box 4951, ISSN Number 0028-9817 -
BUZZ, BLOGS, and BEYOND: the Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004
BUZZ, BLOGS, AND BEYOND: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 Michael Cornfield Senior Research Consultant Pew Internet & American Life Project [email protected] Jonathan Carson President and CEO BuzzMetrics [email protected] Alison Kalis Senior Analyst [email protected] Emily Simon Analyst [email protected] 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY BuzzMetrics and Dr. Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, studied the impact of political blogs on the national agenda during the last two months of the 2004 presidential campaign. (By political blogs, we mean only those few dozen blogs which are devoted to filtering public affairs news and which garner traffic in the tens of thousands.) Highlights: • The scandal known as “Rathergate” and other moments in the 2004 campaign enhanced the reputation of political blogs, bloggers, and the blogosphere –but blogger power, the capacity of blog operators to make buzz and influence decision-makers, is circumstantial: dependent on the sorts of information available, and contingent on the behavior of other public voices. • In our research, we charted the popularity of certain topics which attracted buzz (a lot of simultaneous talk) during the fall campaign across four channels of communication: blogs, citizen chat rooms, the mainstream media, and the national campaigns. The blog and citizen chat room channels were subdivided into conservative, general, and liberal groupings. No recurrent pattern indicative of unilateral blogger influence was detected. Political bloggers were buzz followers as much as buzz makers. • We also coded topics of discussion to see whether preferences in one channel or subdivision corresponded with those in the others. -
Judicial Watch
ihavethetruth.com Right Wing News babalublog.com americanthinker.com theduran.com Roll Call Seattle Times madworldnews.com faustasblog.com unicef.org silenceisconsent.net joemiller.us civiliansinconflict.org spokesman.com truthorfiction.com stream.org fury.news ronpaulinstitute.org houstonchronicle.com lifezette.com inusanews.com Tampa Bay Times The Charlotte Observer tribdem.com Las Vegas Review-Journal Texas Tribune donsurber.blogspot.com josephdenicola.com rothcpa.com Dallas Morning News Morning Call PJMedia blacklistednews.com Power Line pjmedia.com Bustle Forbes Daily Telegraph WIOD WWNC Talking Points Memo WTAM morningconsult.com kex jackpineradicals.com mystatesman.com zeit opensecrets.org kakc houstonchronicle tacticalshit.com twitlonger.com US News & World Report informationclearinghouse.info Amazon FiveThirtyEight The Blaze directorblue.blogspot.com theantimedia.org commoncause.org presidentialvoting2016.com counterjihad.com Vanity FairThe Columbus Dispatch The Bellingham Herald Democracy Now! LA Times storify.com thelasttradition.com dissidentvoice.org Independentthestreet.com grabien.com Foreign Policy s1.zetaboards.comThe Verge addtoany.com WNYC wlrn pbs libertygb.org.uk Philadelphia Inquirer weaselzippers.us Facebook GatewayPundit Chicago Tribune cgepartnership.com Daily Kos donaldjtrump.com PoliticusUSA Reuters Hugh Hewitt towleroad.com Washington Examiner Newsweek baselinescenario.com Salon bluenationreview.com People dailyiowanepi.com ilovemyfreedom.org rncresearch.tumblr.com Buzzfeed charitynavigator.org Investors apnews.com -
Kevin Wallsten Department of Political Science University of California, Berkeley [email protected]
HOW CONSPIRACIES RISE , SPREAD AND FALL : THE CASE OF VOTER FRAUD , THE BLOGOSPHERE AND THE 2004 ELECTION Kevin Wallsten Department of Political Science University of California, Berkeley [email protected] The idea that public opinion is fundamentally top-down and elite-driven is virtually orthodoxy among contemporary political science researchers. Support for conspiracy theories, however, pose a fundamental challenge to this prevailing view because the dynamics of mass opinion here are, prima facie, likely not to be a top-down or elite- driven process. In order to test the hypothesis that conspiratorial thinking is the result of anti-elite, bottom-up opinion dynamics rather than the result of elite-driven, top-down opinion dynamics, this paper tracks blog discussion of election related conspiracy theories during the four week period from November 2 to November 30, 2004. Using a computer assisted, quantitative content analysis of 16 randomly selected A-list political blogs and 147 randomly selected, less popular political blogs, I find strong support for the idea that conspiracy theories are the result of bottom-up, anti-elite opinion dynamics. More specifically, I find that bloggers who endorsed electoral conspiracy theories were more likely to criticize elite sources of information, less likely to link to mainstream media sources and, more importantly, that endorsement of election-related conspiracy theories was not the result of Congressional discussion, executive branch statements, print media articles or broadcast media coverage. Paper prepared for presentation at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are welcome. THE AGE OF CONSPIRACY “This is the age of conspiracy.” Don Delillo, Running Dogs (1989) Conspiracy theories – a set of beliefs in which a cabal of individuals and/or organizations act covertly in order to subvert a legitimate process and achieve some malevolent or otherwise untoward end – have been a long-standing feature of American popular discourse. -
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog Lada Adamic Natalie Glance HP Labs Intelliseek Applied Research Center 1501 Page Mill Road 5001 Baum Blvd. Palo Alto, CA 94304 Pittsburgh, PA 15217 [email protected] [email protected] 4 March 2005 Abstract In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 “A-list” blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern. 1 Introduction The 2004 U.S. Presidential Election was the first Presidential Election in the United States in which blogging played an important role. Although the term weblog was coined in 1997, it was not until after 9/11 that blogs gained readership and influence in the U.S. The next major trend in political blogging was “warblogging”: blogs centered around discussion of the invasion of Iraq by the U.S.1 The year 2004 saw a rapid rise in the popularity and proliferation of blogs. -
I TOWARD a GRAMMAR of the BLOGOSPHERE: RHETORIC and ATTENTION in the NETWORKED IMAGINARY by Damien Smith Pfister B.A., Universit
TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: RHETORIC AND ATTENTION IN THE NETWORKED IMAGINARY by Damien Smith Pfister B.A., University of Alabama, 2000 M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2009i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH School of Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Damien Smith Pfister It was defended on January 16, 2009 and approved by Dr. Gregory Crowley, Coro Center for Civic Leadership Dr. John Lyne, Professor, Department of Communication Dr. Barbara Warnick, Professor, Department of Communication Dissertation Advisor: Gordon R. Mitchell, Associate Professor, Department of Communication ii Copyright © by Damien Smith Pfister 2009 iii TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: RHETORIC AND ATTENTION IN THE NETWORKED IMAGINARY Damien Smith Pfister, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation explores the rhetorical imaginary of internetworked societies by examining three cases where actors in the blogosphere shaped public deliberation. In each case, I analyze a trope that emerged organically as bloggers theorized their own rhetorical interventions, and argue that these tropes signal shifts in how citizens of networked societies imagine their relations. The first case study, on the blogosphere’s reaction to Trent Lott’s 2002 toast to Strom Thurmond, examines how bloggers “flooded the zone” by relentlessly interpreting the event and finding evidence that eventually turned the tide of public opinion against Lott. Flooding the zone signifies the inventional possibilities of blogging through the production of copious public argument. The second case study, focusing on the 2003 blogging of the Salam Pax, an English- speaking Iraqi living in Iraq on the precipice of war, develops the idea of “ambient intimacy” which is produced through the affective economy of blogging. -
Transnational Blogospheres: Virtual Politics, Death, and Lurking in France and the U.S
Transnational Blogospheres: Virtual Politics, Death, and Lurking in France and the U.S. by Scott Matthew Kushner Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date: 10 April 2009 Approved: ___________________________ Linda Orr, Supervisor ___________________________ David F. Bell ___________________________ N. Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Kenneth S. Rogerson Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT Transnational Blogospheres: Virtual Politics, Death, and Lurking in France and the U.S. by Scott Matthew Kushner Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date: 10 April 2009 Approved: ___________________________ Linda Orr, Supervisor ___________________________ David F. Bell ___________________________ N. Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Kenneth S. Rogerson An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright by Scott Matthew Kushner 2009 Abstract What are the meanings of “here” and “there” in a digital age? This dissertation explores how blogs reveal new meanings of being “here” in a political space, how blogs reveal new meanings of being (or not being) “here” in a textually-mediated universe, and how blogs reveal new ways of being seen to be “here” when most internet users are just looking and log on and off without saying a word. Beginning with a reflection on the possibilities of democracy in a world where the interface is drawn to the forefront, I argue that the internet presents a new (and imperfect) way for citizens to operate the machinery of government.