Freedom from the Press?

Abstract

As citizen journalism continues to increase in popularity, social news sites (i.e., websites where users produce the content) are also gaining prominence on the Internet. Nevertheless, there is little research about how social news sites function. One such website, known as Reddit, has a growing user base of more than 100 million individuals and has played an important role in distributing information about critical and current events. Through examining a major incident where Reddit was acknowledged as an important informational entity, this study analyzed varying characteristics of content posted on Reddit in order to determine whether the website, as it claims, has “freedom from the press,” or if it follows gatekeeping practices that are similar to those implemented by traditional media outlets.

KEYWORDS:

• crisis news
• framing
• gatekeeping
• Reddit
• social news sites
• user-generated content

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Reddit is often stylized as “reddit” (in all lowercase letters) as well.

2. No subreddits specific to the Boston Marathon bombing (e.g., /r/findbostonbombers) were analyzed in this study because they did not appear among the top search results. This was most likely due to the strict moderation of such subreddits, which were either deleted entirely, became private domains requiring moderator approval to join, or no longer feature all their original content.

3. Posts (N = 20) in which coders could not identify episodic or thematic frames were removed from the analysis for H1.