Discursive Power in Fragmented Media Systems – the GameStop Short Squeeze Case

• In Event: Online Political Discourse, Identity, and the Future of Democracy

Abstract

In hybrid media systems, platforms can be central to the emergence, diffusion, salience and (re)framing of political issues, sometimes referred to as ‘discursive power (Jungherr, Posegga and An 2019). This paper presents a case study of the GameStop short squeeze in January 2021, as a case involving issues where news media actors are usually thought to hold particularly high discursive power (economics and finance), and nevertheless reveals successful contestation by networked individuals outside of more familiar social movement meso-structures.

We examine differences in the way the short squeeze was discussed in three digital spaces: Reddit, Twitter and digital news media. We expect to find shared heightened attention to the short squeeze, initially introduced by Reddit users but then amplified via other platforms. Yet we also expect that Reddit users will exhibit less discursive power to shape topical interpretations and evaluations of the short squeeze, which we expect to be more fragmented between the three digital spaces.

Research questions and theoretical framework
We organise our analysis around two dimensions of comparison: cross-platform, between Reddit and Twitter; and cross-media, between social media and news media.
Considering the first comparison, we ask: how do the different platform affordances of Reddit and Twitter shape the way users discuss the short squeeze (RQ1)? The combined affordances on Reddit (such as echoing users’ beliefs and creating a feeling of membership as per Prakasam & Huxtable-Thomas 2021) are more oriented toward community-building through stronger social ties, and the coordination of action via a more actively moderated discussion. We expect that these same platform affordances which made Reddit a more effective space to coordinate the action of the short squeeze, also limited its potential as a venue for broader discussions, in particular around the political dimension of the short squeeze. In contrast, we expect that Twitter’s structural openness and light moderation resulted in less capacity for building collective identity or coordinating action, but greater potential to amplify the issue through points of shared commonality with both Reddit and news media.

Considering next the cross-media comparison, we ask: how do the professional norms and business models of professional news media shape the coverage of the short squeeze (RQ2)? We draw on expectations from prior research that news media, and especially economic and financial news, are disproportionately influenced by elite inputs and insider sources. In the case of the short squeeze, we therefore expect that news media will diverge from social media in emphasising the technical and negative aspects of the short squeeze from an elite perspective, rather than the emotional and political aspects which drive a greater proportion of the social media discussion.


Data and methods
Data is collected from three different digital spaces between 22 January and 11 February 2021. We collect submissions to the /wallstreetbets subreddit from Reddit using the PushShift API, in order to maximise completeness of the historical dataset. Tweets are collected from the #GameStop hashtag using the Twitter V2 API. Digital news articles are identified through Media Cloud using the search term “gamestop” for the collection “U.S. Mainstream Media” and retrieved through webscraping. The final dataset then includes three corpora: 148,810 Reddit submissions, 255,585 Tweets, and 1,423 digital news articles from 19 news outlets, further divided between general news and financial outlets.

We then use structural topic modelling to compare the distribution of topics across these different digital spaces. We clean the data in several stages, including removing non-English content, and removing short documents (of less than 5 words) to improve model performance. Our structural topic model then includes covariates for the source of the document (Reddit, Twitter, News – general, News – financial) as well as time in order to track the evolution of topics over the period of our analysis.

Early results show some clear differences between the language used on the different platforms, for example, topics on Twitter which consist primarily of hashtags showcase its affordances geared toward issue amplification. However, we also find more meaningful differences: topics with political content are most prevalent on Twitter and least prevalent on Reddit, while news media frequently uses topics characterised by the professionalised language of finance reporting.



References
Jungherr, A., Posegga, O., & An, J. (2019). Discursive Power in Contemporary Media Systems: A Comparative Framework. International Journal of Press/Politics, 24(4), 404–425.
Prakasam, N., & Huxtable-Thomas, L. (2021). Reddit: Affordances as an Enabler for Shifting Loyalties. Information Systems Frontiers, 23(3), 723–751.

Authors

• Michael Vaughan

• Johannes B. Gruber, European New School of Digital Studies (ENS)

• Ana Ines Langer, University of Glasgow