Body found on Twitter:The role of alternative sources in social media agenda setting

Claudette G. Artwick, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Washington and Lee UniversityICA 2012 Conference, 5/26/12artwickc@wlu.eduOn Twitter @artwickc

Morgan Harrington disappears

From: findmorgan.com

Harrington case in the public agenda

Website screen shots & AP photo

Harrington body found

Testing agenda setting on social media

Examined 48 hours of tweets

Literature• McCombs & Shaw (1972)• Coleman, McCombs, Shaw, & Weaver (2009)• Leavitt, Burchard, Fisher, & Gilbert (2009)• Sayre, Bode, Shah, Wilcox, & Shah (2010)• Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon (2010)• Meraz (2009)

Social media concepts• ‘Networked audience’ Marwick & boyd (2010)

• Links as ‘external marker of source influence’ Meraz (2009)

• Retweets and potential reach Kwak et al. (2010)

H1 A significantly higher number of tweets about

the Morgan Harrington case will link to alternative content than to mainstream news media content.

H2 A significantly higher number of retweeted

messages about the Morgan Harrington case will come from alternative sources than from mainstream news sources.

H3 A significantly higher number of retweeted

messages about the Morgan Harrington case will contain links to alternative content than to mainstream news content.

Measuring agenda setting

Traditional media Twitter

Analyze media content Analyze tweets

Survey public to determine salient issues

Tweets indicate issue salience

Determine relationship between media coverage and public agenda

Links & retweets as indicators of influence

Collecting & coding tweets• Twitter search for ‘Morgan Harrington’• January 26-28, 2010• Hand-coded 1,385 tweets• Yielded 1,261 valid tweets

Variables: Link toMainstream news Alternative source

Variables• Retweets• Twitter member type• Tweet focus

Findings• Support for alternative source agenda setting

in the Morgan Harrington case

H1: Links to external content

H2: Retweets

H3: RT with links to external content

Conclusions• Support for alternative-source agenda setting

• “We are profoundly saddened by the news of the discovery of Morgan Dana Harrington’s body.” Metallica Death Magnetic (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU9BP_uzf8k&feature=youtu.be