Social Movement Organizations as Curating Actors of Political Information (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Rallies, Protests, and Mobilization

Abstract

Like the social media feeds of many organizations, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s (NCTE) “socials,” as they were often called, served as their own kind of media channels, but ones that didn’t distribute (wholly) original content. They offered curated channels of often externally-sourced, but nonetheless highly selective and strategically repurposed political information. And this is how many people receive their information on important sociopolitical issues—through the public (and sometimes private) communications of what Thorson and Wells (2016) called “curating actors.” These actors engage in various activities that “curate” the content that flows into individuals’ personal information networks, including “the production, selection, filtering, annotation, [and] framing of content” (Thorson & Wells, 2016, p. 310). Yet, while we know curating actors have a significant impact on the political information environment in general and on individuals’ personal political information networks specifically, most research has asked what content finds its way into individuals’ media feeds and with what effects, drawing on frameworks centered on selective and incidental exposure (Anspach, 2017; Kaiser et al., 2020; Kümpel, 2019; Merten, 2020; Thorson, 2020; Wells & Thorson, 2017) and algorithmic filtration (DeVito, 2017; Diakopoulos, 2019; Thorson, 2020; Thorson et. al, 2020; Trielli & Diakopoulos, 2020). Missing from the literature is a robust account of the actual curatorial activities curating actors engage in (cf. Merten, 2020; Trilling et al., 2017). What decisions do curating actors make behind the scenes, how do they arrive at those decisions, and why are those decisions the ones that prevail? This article moves to fill that gap, taking NCTE’s social media practices as a case study to investigate how social movement organizations (as one category of curating actor) engage in curatorial work over social media and what logics underpin their curation of political information.

My analysis of this case reveals the “logics of curation” that govern social movement organizations’ curatorial decisions. Specifically, I identifying three criteria that motivate the curation of political information: (1) establishing organizations as authorities on their issue areas and, in doing so, reaffirming their value to followers as curating actors; (2) advancing perspectives aligned with organizations’ own strategic aims through selectively highlighting of externally-sourced stories; and (3) producing deliberate silences on issues and ideas organizations wish to make less salient in the political arena. Moreover, this study illustrated how organizations arrive at curatorial decisions via considerations of social media platforms’ different content norms and temporalities, as well as how they navigate the intervening influence of platform algorithms, which alter the flows of the information organizations curate beyond their control. While different organizations are likely to take somewhat different approaches to navigating the same informational environment, these findings provide researchers with a starting point for a more general theory of the logics of curation that drive how (and why) strategic communicators curate.

References
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Author

• Thomas J Billard, Northwestern University