Academic Research

“Clickbait” media has long been espoused as an unfortunate consequence of the rise of digital journalism. But little is known about why readers choose to read clickbait stories. Is it merely curiosity, or might voters think such stories are more likely to provide useful information? We conduct a survey experiment in Italy, where a major political party enthusiastically embraced the esthetics of new media and encouraged their supporters to distrust legacy outlets in favor of online news. We offer respondents a monetary incentive for correct answers to manipulate the relative salience of the motivation for accurate information. This incentive increases differences in the preference for clickbait; older and less educated subjects become even more likely to opt to read a story with a clickbait headline when the incentive to produce a factually correct answer is higher. Our model suggests that a politically relevant subset of the population prefers Clickbait Media because they trust it more.

Scholars have debated whether social media platforms, by allowing users to select the information to which they are exposed, may lead people to isolate themselves from viewpoints with which they disagree, thereby serving as political “echo chambers.” We investigate hypotheses concerning the circumstances under which Twitter users who communicate about elections would engage with (a) supportive, (b) oppositional, and (c) mixed political networks. Based on online surveys of representative samples of Italian and German individuals who posted at least one Twitter message about elections in 2013, we find substantial differences in the extent to which social media facilitates exposure to similar versus dissimilar political views. Our results suggest that exposure to supportive, oppositional, or mixed political networks on social media can be explained by broader patterns of political conversation (i.e., structure of offline networks) and specific habits in the political use of social media (i.e., the intensity of political discussion). These findings suggest that disagreement persists on social media even when ideological homophily is the modal outcome, and that scholars should pay more attention to specific situational and dispositional factors when evaluating the implications of social media for political communication.

Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves politically on these platforms, the more they are likely to contact politicians via email, campaign for parties and candidates using social media, and attend online events to which they were invited online. These results suggest that lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media do not distract from higher-threshold activities, but are strongly associated with them.

Social media have become increasingly relevant in election campaigns, as both politicians and citizens have integrated them into their communication repertoires. However, little is known about which types of citizens employ these tools to discuss politics and stay informed about current affairs and how they integrate the contents and connections they encounter online with their offline repertoires of political action. In order to address these questions, we devised an innovative online survey involving a random sample representative of Italians who communicated about the 2013 general election on Twitter. Our results show that Twitter political users in Italy are disproportionately male, younger, better educated, more interested in politics, and ideologically more left-wing than the population as a whole. Moreover, there is a strong correlation between online and offline political communication, and Twitter users often relay the political contents they encounter on the web in their face-to-face conversations. Although the political users of social media are not representative of the population, their greater propensity to engage in political conversations both online and offline make them important channels of personal communication and allow the contents that circulate on the web to diffuse among populations that are much broader than those that engage with social media. The electoral significance of these digital platforms thus reaches well beyond the immediate audiences that are exposed to political contents through them.