1,720,981 research outputs found
Who Encounters Disinformation Online and Why? Investigating Predictors of Exposure to Disinformation
No full textWho encounters disinformation online? Combining survey and web tracking data to investigate predictors of disinformation exposure
No full textThe rapid spread of disinformation online poses a challenge for democratic societies. Defined as intentionally or knowingly false statements that are disseminated to reach a certain goal, disinformation raises concerns, such as increasingly misinformed and polarized societies or declining trust in traditional journalism. However, certain studies (e.g., Altay et al., 2021) argue that the prevalence and impact of disinformation might be overstated and vary among individuals. Despite the importance of this issue, our empirical understanding of the degree to which individuals are exposed to disinformation, remains limited. While some studies (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) provide evidence for an overall high (perceived) exposure to disinformation, studies relying on passive measurements (e.g., Guess et al., 2018) found that exposure to disinformation is low on average, but highly concentrated within specific groups.
To address these diverging assessments, we introduce a novel approach to examine online disinformation exposure on the individual level and how it relates to individual characteristics and political attitudes which were identified as influential in this context by earlier research. While some of their findings are contradictory, earlier studies (e.g., Reuter et al., 2019) showed that demographic characteristics (i.e., age, gender, education) affect disinformation exposure. In line with the theory of selective exposure, we know that political attitudes determine information consumption and that it also affects exposure to disinformation (Guess et al., 2018). Following this theoretical argument, previous research that highlighted a conceptual affinity between populism and disinformation, and previous findings, we assume that populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes predict disinformation exposure online. Finally, a higher trust in non-traditional media which could result in a higher reliance on social media and right-wing alternative media for political information consumption is decisive, since recent studies (e.g., Guess et al., 2020) have highlighted the significant role of these platforms in the spread of disinformation.
We combined survey and tracking data of German participants’ online information behavior using a tracking tool based on the screen-scraping approach (N = 594). To detect disinformation, we trained artificial neural network-based classifiers on a large corpus of disinformation (N = 861 disinformation items retrieved from Germanophone fact checking projects) and true information (3k news stories scraped from news websites). By applying the classifiers to the tracking data (N of web pages = 144,404) and manually verifying the classified items, we make two contributions: first, we provide an empirical assessment of actual exposure to disinformation in a multiparty European context, which goes beyond the usual focus on a US context. Second, we introduce an automated method for disinformation detection for Germanophone textual data.
Our findings revealed that exposure to disinformation was low on average and exposure to disinformation was highly concentrated, as only a small portion of users (18%) was exposed to disinformation online. Further, results from a zero-inflated Poisson regression showed that individuals with lower levels of education, stronger PRR attitudes, a higher trust in non-traditional media and a stronger reliance on social and right-wing alternative media were more likely to be exposed to more disinformation online
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Media consumption and conspiracy beliefs in COVID-19 times – combing tracking and survey research
No full textIn this paper we examine the influence of information consumption on the development of conspiracy beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic. Hereby, we assume that alternative online channels are crucial for understanding how conspiracy ideas spread. So far, however, research has primarily relied on survey data for analyzing information consumption. Such self-reported data tend to overjudge the usage of traditional media (e.g. Prior, 2009) and underperform in the case of alternative information channels used in our today’s multi-channel information environment due to social desirability and participants’ inability to recall their information diets. To counter these limitations, we combine survey data with tracking data acquired via an in-house solution that captures both URLs of the visited pages and their content for a broad range of platforms (e.g., news media and social media)
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Automated Tracking Approaches for Studying Online Media Use: A Critical Review and Recommendations
Get PDFWith the increasing importance of online information environments, researchers have started investigating direct measures of online media use, such as online tracking. Most existing studies using tracking data have so far relied on commercial solutions, but these have limitations in terms of their costliness, replicability, and applicability to certain research questions. Hence, different research groups are developing their own tracking solutions for academic purposes. In this paper, we provide a critical review and classification of the existing approaches, apt to guide research decisions on the appropriate tracking approach and tool. First, we develop criteria to distinguish different user-centric desktop and mobile tracking approaches and tools (types of information, technical complexity, privacy implementation, user experience, and availability). Second, we describe different tools and approaches – separately for desktop and mobile tracking – with concrete examples and evaluate them using the aforementioned criteria. Finally, we discuss how different mobile and desktop tracking solutions can complement each other and provide recommendations for future research
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