Description and analysis of the article

“Tweeting along partisan lines: identity-motivated elaboration and presidential debates“ (Jennings et al. 2020) explores partisan social identification, how it develops, and how it influences both political views and candidate affiliation as expressed via social media. Published in the peer reviewed journal Social Media + Society, the authors, experts in the field of political communication from the Universities of Missouri and Kansas, describe the phenomenon of second screening, where members of the public use social media on a mobile device while consuming other types of media, for example a televised debate. Platforms such as Twitter facilitate live-tweeting, allowing viewers to become active content creators in real time – a particularly engaging, persuasive and informative form of user interaction.

Jennings et al. apply the Theory of Identity-Motivated Elaboration (TIME) to examine how a range of factors, including social identity and image, influence how voters evaluate political candidates and establish preferences. Additionally, second screening provides users with the cognitive engagement required to achieve what is called elaboration, or the ability to understand complex arguments.  Elaboration is improved when there is personal involvement and live-tweeting not only provides this personal involvement, it gives researchers with a way to measure evaluation (Jennings et al. 2017).

Do you agree with the authors? If not – why not?

While I agree that live-tweeting  improves information acquisition by elevating cognitive expenditure (thereby increasing elaboration), several questions remain. Firstly, does media-multitasking add or detract from learning?  According to a study (Gottfried et al. 2017), “social networking site (SNS) use overall correlates with increased knowledge of campaign issues and facts above and beyond the use of other sources of news media“. The flip-side is that the “differential learning occurring largely for knowledge that is favourable to one’s preferred candidate“, thereby supporting the hypothesis of Jennings et al.

More serious consequences for the future of social media in elaboration is the appearance of social media platforms purporting to be freer, non-censored alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. One such platform is Parler, a free iPhone app, which, in the days following the recent US Federal election, racked up nearly 1 million downloads in just five days.

The rise of social media sites such as MeWe, Gab and Parler, which range from conservative to extremist, give evidence to the theory that increasing levels of political segregation will lead to people to social media services designed to bring together like-minded users, creating what has been termed the “echo-chamber effect” (Cota et al, 2019), as Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble discusses in his TED talk.

References:

Cota, W., Ferreira, S. C., Pastor-Satorras, R., & Starnini, M. (2019). Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks. EPJ Data Science, 8(1), 1-13. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0213-9

Garimella,K., De Francisci Morales, G., Gionis, A. & Mathioudakis, M. (2018). Political discourse on social media: Echo chambers, gatekeepers, and the price of bipartisanship. In WWW 2018: The 2018 Web Conference, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186139

Gottfried, J., Hardy, B., Holbert, L., Winneg, K., & Jamieson, K. (2017). The changing nature of political debate consump- tion: Social media, multi-tasking, and knowledge acquisition. Political Communication, 34(2), 172–199. https://doi.org/10.1 080/10584609.2016.1154120

Jennings, F. J., Bramlett, J. C., McKinney, M. S., & Hardy, M. M. (2020). Tweeting along partisan lines: Identity-motivated elaboration and presidential debates. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120965518