| Popis: |
How do social networks affect the spread of protest information in social media? The existing body of literature on media effects and information diffusion identifies various components which can influence media consumers’ perception of new information and their decision to diffuse information or contents, including network-related components. In this article, I suggest the political characteristics of accounts that share protest information affect how the information gets interpreted and diffused by other Twitter users focusing on the Twitter protest hashtag network. I argue whether Twitter accounts that share protest information gets perceived as strongly political or not can affect how other users perceive the signals regarding political protests. I expect to observe more political influence on Twitter accounts that are not perceived as political by others compared with accounts that are viewed as political accounts. To test my theory, I will conduct an online experiment with vignettes that simulate the informational environment that participants would face during their actual Twitter activities. All participants would be provided with simulated Twitter pages with various Tweets, the same as they observe when they are using Twitter in real. The simulated pages will be filled with various types of Tweets, including Tweets with protest information. I will ask participants whether they will retweet the Tweets they observe. Participants would be provided with profile information of Twitter accounts that have published Tweets in the vignettes. The variation will be implemented in the political characteristics of profiles: some publishers would have various political traits in their profiles while others’ profiles would not contain political information. |
