Twitter Isn’t As Democratic As You Think
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 16th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
Twitter Isn’t As Democratic As You Think
A new study says Twitter does more to amplify celebrities than to foster open debate.
The post Twitter Isn’t As Democratic As You Think appeared first on ThinkProgress.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
Twitter has been hailed as a groundbreaking medium for open discussions on politics and society. But a new study claims that the social network may do less to foster open debate than it does to simply amplify celebrity voices.
Researchers from University of Pittsburgh, Northeastern University, and Cornell University sifted through nearly 300 million tweets to see how people communicate during the 2012 presidential election season. They hoped to find out how people’s reactions to live media events like an election changed the course of public discussions. Instead, researchers found that people preferred to retweet prominent commentators like liberal comedian Bill Maher and Republican strategist Karl Rove.
“Frankly, we’re rather disappointed,” Drew Margolin, one of the study’s authors from Cornell University said in a news release. “Social media has so much potential to improve the diversity of voices and quality of exchanges in political discussion by giving individuals the technological capability to compete with the mass media in disseminating information, setting agendas and framing conversation.”
According to the study, the top 25 percent of users’ tweets accounted for almost three out of every four retweets. Even though more than one in five people on Twitter use the microblogging site to engage in political debate, the almost 200,000 observed users retweeted celebrities such as left-leaning comedian Bill Maher, and conservative media personalities Sean Hannity and Karl Rove the most.
Retweeting celebrities was especially high among newer Twitter users with few followers (less than 90) but was common for typical users with up to 1,000 followers. The study also found that celebrities or elite users tended to reply to other celebrities, and while they rarely retweeted another user, it was usually another celebrity. They also replied to messages just as often as Twitter “rookies” did.
Twitter users are the most active during live media events such as the Oscars, the World Cup or presidential debates. But despite Twitter’s reputation as a unique platform for open conversations from a variety of voices, users seem less interested in articulating their own thoughts or those of their non-famous friends or followers.
Part of that could be because people don’t feel they have the expertise to comment on live events. “The uncertainty of live events may predispose users to seek information from authorities and their expert sense-making processes rather than from their peers,” the study stated. That trend is exacerbated by Twitter’s paradigm that the most popular accounts get the most visibility and therefore have more clout in a public forum.
Social media has generally been lauded as an ideal platform for public discourse. Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in increasing awareness of various issues, increasing voter turnout, predicting elections, and bringing awareness to issues that would otherwise fly under the media’s radar. The Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls brought worldwide attention to nearly 200 Nigerian girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram earlier this year. Twitter was also key during the Arab Spring, Tunisian and Eqyptian democratic revolutions.
But while social media revolutionizes how the world responds to political and social events, it may be a double-edged sword. Researchers warned that the tendency to fixate on a small number of opinions encourages the proliferation of rumors, misinformation, and political polarization.
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Texas Oil And Gas Regulator Bans Its Staff From Talking To The Media
“It’s just bad government to not let members of the public and the media interview taxpayer-funded staff.”
The post Texas Oil And Gas Regulator Bans Its Staff From Talking To The Media appeared first on ThinkProgress.
A drilling rig is seen near Kennedy, Texas, Wednesday, May 9, 2012.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Eric Gay
Texas is one of the top oil– and gas-producing states in the nation. But if you’re a member of the media, don’t expect to get an interview with the people who regulate the industry in the state.
That’s because the agency in charge of regulating Texas’ oil and gas industry has barred its staff from talking to the media, instituting a policy that instead funnels all media requests through a spokesperson, who doesn’t allow reporters access to agency officials. As the AP reports, the Railroad Commission of Texas, which is one of the largest state agencies of its kind in the country, approved a policy barring staff from talking to reporters in August, about a year after the agency’s new executive director Milton Rister, a former aide to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, took office. A spokesperson for the Railroad Commission of Texas told the AP that the decision to bar staff from media interviews came from Rister. Before Rister took office, the AP reports, Railroad Commission staff were regularly available for interviews.
According to the AP, the Railroad Commission policy states that if a staffer is given permission to do an interview, “the employee shall be responsible for any misinformation, misquotes, misinterpretations or misrepresentations conveyed by the employee. Failure to comply with this policy could result in disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.”
Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, said he thinks the agency’s policy raises red flags on whether the leadership of the Railroad Commission is worried that its staff might disclose some “uncomfortable truths” about oil and gas drilling in Texas to the media. Texas has experienced “enormous” growth in oil and gas drilling over the last few years, he said, with oil and gas production doubling in the last six years.
“Now more than ever it’s critical that government regulators are transparent in how they’re dealing with this boom,” he said.
Last month, the Railroad Commission found that there wasn’t enough evidence to tie an increase in methane contamination of private wells in Texas over the last few years to gas production in the region. The agency said it won’t investigate the case further, even though previous studies have suggested the methane contamination could be tied to oil and gas activity.
When a state agency releases findings like this — ones that appear to contradict previous studies on the same subject — it needs to make its staffers available to explain to the media how it came to its conclusion, Metzger said.
“It’s just bad government to not let members of the public and the media interview taxpayer-funded staff,” he said.
Metzger said Environment America will be launching a petition to try to get the Railroad Commission to reverse its policy.
As energy development booms in Texas, the state has been in the spotlight in recent months for how little it knows about the environmental impact of its fracking and drilling boom. An eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Weather Channel found in February that Texas is failing to adequately monitor the emissions from the Eagle Ford shale play, one of the most active drilling sites in the United States. According to the investigation, thousands of oil and gas facilities aren’t required to report their emissions data to the state, and instead are allowed to self-audit their emissions.
As oil and gas development booms in Texas, so does pollution — the investigation found that the state has experienced a one-hundred percent increase in “unplanned, toxic air releases” from oil and gas production since 2009. Residents who live close to gas wells have complained of health problems — one resident profiled by the investigation, who lives within 2.5 miles of 50 wells, said she can’t sit on her porch some days and that her eyes burn and head regularly aches.
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