Keeping It Brief: Analyzing Media Framing of Supreme Court Decisions on Twitter

• In Event: Public Opinion's Effect on Courts

Abstract

Social media networks facilitate perhaps the most dynamic and emerging source for political news today. Regardless of their national prowess, countless media outlets rely on social media to promote readership in an environment that demands concise and informative news coverage. Perhaps most challenging is attempting to relay the substantive implications of lengthy and complex decisions by the Supreme Court within a restrictive character limit. Yet, little work is devoted to analyzing the dynamic linking the media's framing of the Court's decision-making on Twitter and the resulting engagement by users. I explore this dynamic using posts concerning cases decided by the Court between 2018 and 2020. Specifically, I demonstrate how case-specific factors, including perceptions of a case's underlying political salience, reveal new understandings of the variation in framing by media outlets on Twitter. I further illustrate how that variation influences engagement and behavioral responses by users.

Author

• Jake Stanton Truscott, University of Georgia