The Effectiveness of Framing on the Diffusion of Political Content

• In Event: Framing in the Wild and the Lab

Abstract

Framing is to highlight a certain aspect of an issue over the others, nudging readers or listeners towards a particular problem definition on the issue even without making a biased argument. It has been argued that the frames used by politicians and media affect the public understanding of issue salience. Much of the extant research on framing effects suffer from two major drawbacks. First, most of the previous research has been taking place offline, in which framing could have immediate effect. Second, a majority of studies about framing effects on social media users have not been really about framing.

In this paper, using two different Twitter datasets to explore the extent to which media and politicians used various frames in their tweets and to measure their effectiveness on the spread of content on Twitter. Our preliminary results on a large sample of tweets about the issue of content moderation (n = 2,586,466) show that, across all users, the frames employed in tweets are unrelated to the number of retweets. However, there are significant differences between types of users, particularly for frames specific to the issue of content moderation. For both verified users and those with many followers, tweets framing content moderation as a “problem” (e.g., as an excessive restriction of free speech) received less retweets relative to tweets without specific frames, whereas tweets framing content moderation as a “solution” (e.g, to counter disinformation or hate speech) received more retweets. These findings underscore the relevance of framing for the diffusion of political discourse on Twitter,

Authors

• Meysam Alizadeh, University of Zurich

• Zeynab Samei

• Maël Dominique Kubli, University of Zurich

• Fabrizio Gilardi, University of Zurich