Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem Through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter
By Kate Starbird. International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2017
295 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This research explores the alternative media ecosystem through a Twitter lens. Over a ten-month period, we collected tweets related to alternative narratives — for example, conspiracy theories — of mass shooting events. We utilized tweeted URLs to generate a domain network, connecting domains shared by the same user, then conducted qualitative analysis to understand the nature of different domains and how they connect to each other. Our findings demonstrate how alternative news sites propagate and shape alternative narratives, while mainstream media deny them. We explain how political leanings of alternative news sites do not align well with a U.S. left-right spectrum, but instead feature an anti-globalist (versus globalist) orientation where U.S. Alt-Right sites look similar to U.S. Alt-Left sites. Our findings describe a subsection of the emerging alternative media ecosystem and provide insight in how websites that promote conspiracy theories and pseudo-science may function to conduct underlying political agendas.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e9059740ca3c54b213b3f70e91a503afaa271af
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Citations in the corpus
- The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News (2019, background): “It also feeds into a context of polarization, alternative media, and hyperpartisanship consistent with emerging patterns of news consumption (Bastos, 2016; Starbird, 2017).”
- False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey (2018, background): “Starbird [95] found that alternate media (false news) domains form tightly connected clusters, meaning that many users mention these domains together in their false information tweets.”
- The Pushshift Reddit Dataset (2020, background): “The online disinformation research community has focused its attention on how social media facilitates the spread of deliberately inaccurate information [100, 115].”
- The spread of low-credibility content by social bots (2017, unknown): “Due to the impossibility to fact-check millions of articles, this approach of using sources as proxies for misinformation labels is increasingly adopted in the literature cited in the main text, and more [53, 49, 65, 3, 17].”