Legitimating a Platform: Evidence of Journalists’ Role in Transferring Authority to Twitter

Social media platforms legitimate speech and shape journalism

Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduits to surface the words of ‘ordinary people.’ This practice treats tweets more like content, an interchangeable building block of news, than like sources, whose ideas and messages must be verified. Using a corpus of U.S. news stories with tweets in them, we provide empirical evidence for our argument of the power of platforms to legitimate speech and shape journalism. This study illuminates journalists’ role in transferring some of the press’s authority to Twitter, thereby shaping the participants in and content of public deliberation.

What does it mean to be Asian? And what does it mean to do Asian American collective politics?

This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Engaging with data that has been erased requires methodological creativity

This chapter in a longer, edited volume explores the quetion of how to collect data that have been erased from their primary locations on the Web, a category Freelon calls absent data. In such situations, the standard methods of data collection cannot be applied; indeed, in some cases it may not be possible to obtain absent data at all. Using an empirical case of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Freelon offers four methods for when other, more standard methods fail.