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Abstract
News media regularly include the voice of the “man or woman in the street” alongside that of the actors involved in a news story. Journalists use these vox pops to give an impression of public opinion. With the coming of social media, access to people’s opinions has never been so easy. Little research exists about how social media (Twitter in particular) are used by journalists to describe public opinion. This is the question this research aims to answer by using a combination of a qualitative and a quantitative content analysis of Dutch and Flemish news websites. We found several patterns regarding the use of Twitter vox pops. First, we found Twitter to be regularly used as a representation of public opinion. Second, many items generalised these opinions to larger groups with strong—mostly negative—emotions. Third, when referring to Twitter, the articles used (abstract) quantifiers and hyperbolic terms (commotion, explosions) to imply an objective basis for these inferences about the “vox Twitterati”.
Notes
1. The results were ordered for relevance and not by date, since sorting by date resulted in an unworkable list of pages mentioning the text “op Twitter” anywhere but in the news item on the page. We are aware that how Google’s algorithms determine what “relevance” entails is unclear, but we believe our relatively big sample mitigates the representativeness question.