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Chadwick_Vaccari_OLoughlin_-_Do_Tabloids_Poison_the_Well_of_Social_Media_-_New_Media_and_Society_2018.pdf (439.07 kB)

Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-01, 10:55 authored by Andrew ChadwickAndrew Chadwick, Cristian Vaccari, Ben O'Loughlin
The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing (N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data (N = 17,989 web domains), news article data (N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users (N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.

Funding

The authors received financial support from the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University and the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London for the research and authorship of this article.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Communication and Media

Published in

New Media and Society

Volume

20

Issue

11

Pages

4255 - 4274

Citation

CHADWICK, A., VACCARI, C. and O'LOUGHLIN, B., 2018. Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing. New Media and Society, 20 (11), pp.4255-4274.

Publisher

© The authors. Published by SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-30

Publication date

2018-04-20

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal New Media and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769689

ISSN

1461-4448

eISSN

1461-7315

Language

  • en