Posting about politics: Media as resources for political expression on Facebook

ABSTRACT

This paper explores political expression on Facebook during the 2012 presidential debates. We investigate how individuals and organizations appropriated media resources to craft responses to the debates, and what this reveals about sources of influence in political communication on social media. In particular, we compare the stream of posts that spread widely during the debates—content that “went viral”—with more mundane practices of personal expression to show differences between the viral content that caught the attention of news media coverage about the debates and the posting practices of individuals using their Facebook as a site for individual expression.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• Facebook
• news sharing
• politics
• posting
• social media

Notes

1. Radian6 does not capture organization pages.

2. The third most common word in debate two was “women,” which overlapped with the binders full of women meme.

3. It is worth emphasizing the reasons this is a rough approximation of widely shared posts. First, we cannot know how closely the most commonly shared posts in our public data match the most commonly shared posts behind Facebook privacy settings. Second, this approach—identifying matching post content—undercounts sharing practices in that it excludes instances where the poster made small changes to the content of the post when sharing.

4. Posts that were not available for coding because they had been taken down (N = 60) were each replaced with another post, sampled at random.

5. All the posts belonging to #60 on our top-100 list were missing. It’s likely that the original source removed the content from Facebook, thus removing it from any subsequent shares and making it unavailable for coding. Consequently, our sample of the top 100 actually contains 99 posts.

6. Coders were instructed to examine the source of the link, not the content genre. For example a blog from the New York Times would be treated as coming from the New York Times and coded appropriately (not as a blog).

7. The appropriate reliability sample size was determined by following Riffe, Lacy, and Fico’s (2005) recommendations for achieving 95% confidence level assuming 90% agreement in the population.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Edgerly

Stephanie Edgerly is an assistant professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her research explores how changes in the media landscape provide individuals with new opportunities to engage with news and political content.

Kjerstin Thorson

Kjerstin Thorson is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the role of digital and social media in promoting—or hindering—political engagement, particularly among youth.

Leila Bighash

Leila Bighash is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research focuses on knowledge sharing, visibility, and organizing in online communities and social media.

Mark Hannah

Mark Hannah is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on journalism cultures in the context of globalization.