Visibility Through Information Sharing: The Role of Tweet Authors and Communication Styles in Retweeting Political Information on Twitter

Engelmann, Ines; Kloss, Andrea; Neuberger, Christoph und Brockmann, Tobias (2019): Visibility Through Information Sharing: The Role of Tweet Authors and Communication Styles in Retweeting Political Information on Twitter. In: International Journal of Communication, Bd. 13: S. 3569-3588

Abstract

If a speaker's political message on Twitter is retweeted, both the speaker and the message become visible to a wider network of Twitter users, making the tweet actor more prominent on the Twittersphere or beyond. This study analyzes the effects of different types of tweet authors (such as politicians, journalists, economic actors, members of nonprofit interest groups, and citizens) and the communication styles of political information (affect and rationality) on the number of retweets. The potential effects of these factors are hypothesized based on the heuristic-systematic model but are also discussed in the normative context of public sphere theories. A content analysis of 4,403 tweets shows that the author types, communication styles, and their interactions affect the number of retweets. The theoretical and normative implications of these results are discussed.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Sozialwissenschaften > Kommunikationswissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 000 Informatik, Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke > 070 Publizistische Medien, Journalismus, Verlagswesen
• ISSN: 1932-8036
• Sprache: Englisch