Media Framing and Social Media Discourse: a Positioning Analysis of Political Discourse Present on Facebook
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Nutter, Ian
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Abstract
Recognizing the fact that shifts in communications technologies can fundamentally restructure the way in which members of society relate with one another, this study is focused on the analysis of the interactional patterns taking place on social media and Facebook specifically. By focusing on political discourse centered around a central topic (immigration) taking place on a variety of news media pages spanning the political spectrum this study also makes a connection between discourse taking place on the part of consumers and the framing provided by the media organizations themselves in order to determine the strength of media framing on consumer behavior and attitudes. In general the findings of this study are that consumers tend to follow the pages which support their beliefs and attitudes and will defend the framing against those who disagree. Additionally it was found that although all of the pages showed some degree of cross cutting interaction, the more liberal pages were more inundated with users disagreeing with their positioning than the more conservative pages.
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Social media, Discourse, Conflict, Political communication, Positioning theory