Information-sharing practices on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign: An “unreliable information bubble” within the extreme right
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Julien Figeac
, Nikos Smyrnaios
Abstract
This research explores the spread of unreliable information on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign. By analyzing information-sharing behavior on 252 Facebook pages, our study highlights the wide variety of information sources shared by several political communities, notably news published by partisan websites or activist blogs. Our results demonstrate that political parties – particularly, those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum – tend to re-share a large amount of information reflecting the same ideological positions as their own. This trend is amplified by a phenomenon of endo-citation, that is, a “circular circulation” of information between Facebook pages within the same political community. Our results focus on the information practices of the far-right, tracing a clear over-representation of sources that are unreliable or likely to relay disinformation. We argue that this circular transmission of information creates an “unreliable information bubble” that characterizes far-right information-sharing behavior.
Acknowledgement
The French National Research Agency generiously supported this research (The Listic project – ANR-16-CE26-0014-0).
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Focus on Media Policy and Strategic Communication
- Social bureaucracy? The integration of social media into government communication
- Data-driven campaigns in public sensemaking: Discursive positions, contextualization, and maneuvers in American, British, and German debates around computational politics
- Public discourse, political legitimacy, and collective identity: Cases from Iraq, Brazil and China
- The effects of five public information campaigns: The role of interpersonal communication
- Focus on Audiences
- Sensitizing the concept of mediatization for the study of social movements
- Upset with the refugee policy: Exploring the relations between policy malaise, media use, trust in news media, and issue fatigue
- Information-sharing practices on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign: An “unreliable information bubble” within the extreme right
- Pathways to political (dis-)engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement
- Does fake news lead to more engaging effects on social media? Evidence from Romania
- Focus on Media Content
- Reconsidering churnalism: How news factors in corporate press releases influence how journalists treat these press releases after initial selection
- Clouded reality: News representations of culturally close and distant ethnic outgroups
- The construction of the Arab-Islamic issue in foreign news: Spanish newspaper coverage of the Egyptian revolution
- The world’s first mainly female cabinet: “The council of female ministers” in the Spanish cabinet (2018) on Twitter
- From Wanderers to Strangers. The shifting space of Scandinavian immigration debate 1970–2016
- The 2015 refugee crisis, uncertainty and the media: Representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Austrian and French media
- Austerity and fragmentation: Dynamics of Europeanization of media discourses in Greece and Italy
- “As quiet as a mouse”: Media use in Azerbaijan