Social Media and the Dynamics of Agenda Setting in British Political Discourse: The Case of Twitter and Parliamentary

Debate

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford

Candidate Number: 955100 St Hughs College

Word count: 9943

Abstract

For over forty years, agenda setting has provided a reliable theoretical framework for understanding how the mass media influences the formation of the public agenda. However, the rise of the Internet and especially social media might be seen to threaten the assumptions of consensus and causality which undergird agenda setting theory. This study uses data collected from the popular social media platform Twitter during three high-profile parliamentary events to investigate the continued relevance of agenda setting theory. It uses content analysis techniques to identify the professional affiliations of the most popular Twitter users, and calculates the extent to which these users rebroadcast external content. The study finds that traditional journalists and media organisations retain prominent positions in the network, and that this media elite seldom incorporates other, outside voices in the news-making process. In light of these findings, the traditional media elite appear well-positioned to continue to exercise considerable influence over the setting of the agenda in the age of social media.

Acknowledgements

No thesis is to be taken on lightly, and in the formation of this one I am indebted to my tutor, Sandra Gonzlez-Bailn for her patient guidance through the process. I also received generous help from Elizabeth Dubois and Jonathan Bright at the OII, and would like to thank family and friends, college and cohort, for enduring support, encouragement and inspiration.

Table of Contents

List of tables ................................................................................................................................ 6

List of figures............................................................................................................................... 7

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 8

Agenda setting theory: causation, consensus and the challenge of social media ...........................................11

An introduction to agenda setting ................................................................................... 11 Two assumptions of agenda setting: causation and consensus........................... 12 The impact of the Internet on agenda setting theory .............................................. 14 Twitter and agenda setting ................................................................................................ 18 Political context ...................................................................................................................... 22

Research questions .................................................................................................................25

Research methods ...................................................................................................................26

Design ......................................................................................................................................... 26 Data collection and sampling ............................................................................................ 27 Analytical approach .............................................................................................................. 29 Research ethics ....................................................................................................................... 31

Findings and discussion ........................................................................................................32

The most followed Twitter users who are they and who do they work for?32 Retweeting, linking, and the gatekeeping role on Twitter ..................................... 36

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................41

References ..................................................................................................................................43

Appendices.................................................................................................................................47

Top Trends during data collection periods ................................................................. 47

List of tables
Table A: linking theory to research................................................................................. 22 Table B: summary of data collection .............................................................................. 28 Table C: classifying popular users ................................................................................... 29 Table D: origins of retweets ............................................................................................... 38 Table E: target location of links ........................................................................................ 39

List of figures
Figure A1: coding elites (24th April) ............................................................................... 32 Figure A2: coding elites (8th May) ................................................................................... 33 Figure A3: coding elites (15th May) ................................................................................ 33 Figure B: media followers .................................................................................................. 34 Figure C: retweets as percentage of tweets ................................................................. 37

Introduction
Democracy in its original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside peoples heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside. Walter Lippmann (1922, p. 32)

The process by which decisions are made in democratic societies is immensely complex. Somehow, the beliefs and perspectives of many millions of citizens must be incorporated into coherent laws and norms. In response to this challenge, citizenries around the world have adopted representative government as a model for effective decision-making. By ceding executive and legislative power to elected representatives, the burden of law creation and enforcement passes from ordinary people to political elites (Dahl, 1989, p.28). In practice, of course, representative government is no panacea. Neither is it the only cornerstone of decision-making in modern democracies. The emergence of mass media first newspapers, then radio and television also undergird the cohesion and coherence of democratic deliberation in the modern world. Yet while the relationship between citizen and representative is plain to see elections are an enduring symbol of the exercise of popular power the role played by these mass media in shaping the decision-making process is much more difficult to portray or even prove. Agenda setting theory provides a persuasive and credible account of the communicative power of mass media platforms, and their resulting impact on democratic decision-making. Neatly encapsulated by Bernard Cohens assertion

that the press may not be successful in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful telling its readers what to think about (1963, p.13), agenda setting provides a theoretical basis for understanding the role played by the mass media alongside the public and the political elite in the formation of political opinion and the enactment of policy. Dating back to a 1972 study, which found a highly significant association between the political attitudes of voters and the political content of local media in an American town (McCombs and Shaw, 1972), agenda setting theory posits that mass media has a significant influence over which political issues are discussed and dwelt upon by the public at large. Subsequent research in this area has tended to support and augment rather than replace this original insight (McCombs and Shaw, 1993). However, the emergence of the Internet, and in particular the latest generation of new media platforms it has facilitated, has the potential to undermine the mechanisms by which agenda setting operates, necessitating a new theoretical approach to conceptualise these changes. In particular, the diversity of online content and the potential for interactivity between creator and consumer present distinct challenges to agenda setting, a theory forged in the context of a mass media landscape. If, using the Internet and social media, citizens enjoy a much wider and more diverse choice of outlets, and have a greater ability to interact with and influence the content of these outlets, the simple, unidirectional model that agenda setting posits may be rendered obsolete. The microblogging service Twitter embodies these new patterns of communication. Twitter has elements of both a social network and a news medium (Kwak et al 2010), allowing users to post truncated messages to their followers, other users who have subscribed to their feed. The fact that following somebody need not be reciprocated permits a wide range of communicative practices, including both one-to-one and one-to-many forms of communication. As such, Twitter has been used in a multitude of different ways, from individual socialising to news reporting by organisations transmitting to

massive audiences of followers. Twitter therefore provides a particularly appropriate environment for investigating whether the conditions exist for the core assumptions of agenda setting theory to subsist in the era of social media. This study analyses tweets and other data collected from Twitter during three parliamentary sessions in the UKs House of Commons. The three high-profile sessions all engendered popular political discussion on Twitter; two were weekly editions of Prime Ministers Question Time and the third was the annual Queens Speech. The following chapter sets out the theoretical basis for the subsequent empirical analysis, introducing two core assumptions of agenda setting and exploring the ways in which these assumptions are being challenged by shifts in information and communication dynamics.

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Agenda setting theory: causation, consensus and the challenge of social media
This literature review describes the original foundations of agenda setting theory. It focusses on two of the core assumptions upon which the theory relies: the causal flow of influence from media to public, and the ability of the mass media to drive consensus in society. This is followed by an exploration of how the characteristics of mass communication on the Internet might pose a challenge to these assumptions. The section concludes with a description of Twitter as a specific communication platform and an introduction to the political context of the study.

An introduction to agenda setting

Whilst the birth of agenda setting theory is generally ascribed to a landmark study by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw in 1972, its conception may be said to have occurred half a century earlier. In Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann sketched out many of the conceptual underpinnings of the theory. Lippmanns central contention was that the limits of time, space and cognition hinder the capacity of ordinary people to form a truly rational overview of public affairs. Instead, people rely on a pseudo-environment, a highly refracted understanding of the political world. As Lippmann explains, events in the real world are reported to us chiefly by words [which are] transmitted by wire or radio the mass media of Lippmanns age and subject to technological and commercial limitations (p.65). In their Chapel Hill study, McCombs and Shaw (1972) used empirical data to test Lippmanns hypothesis that mass media have a powerful influence over how the public understand political affairs. Comparing the political issues covered by local media during 1968 presidential election campaign with residents

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judgments of the most important issues, McCombs and Shaw found a very strong relationship (a correlation of .967) between the two sets of issues (p.180). The researchers thus concluded that the [mass] media are the primary sources of national political information (p.185), giving strong credence to their agenda setting hypothesis. The implications of this theory for democratic functioning were and remain substantial. As Lippmann had already hinted, agenda setting theory would seem to assign great power and influence to the journalists and news editors involved in the selection and description of news stories. This power of selection is often described as gatekeeping, a concept which dates back to a 1950 study that explored what a wire editor considered when selecting which news stories would be published to the local community (White, 1950). Gatekeeping and agenda setting are not perfectly coterminous theories of mass communication, as gatekeeping theory also contends that news organizations can directly affect audience attitudes (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009, p.3), a concept which agenda setting emerged in opposition to (Rogers and Dearing, 1998). This study, however, proceeds with the use of gatekeeping as an incorporated concept in agenda-setting theory more broadly (McCombs, 2004, p.86). The genesis of agenda setting theory can be clearly identified, but the plethora of conceptual and methodological directions that researchers have moved in since are rather harder to outline. As Kosicki notes, coming to grips with the totality of what has been written about agenda setting is an exceedingly complex task (1993, p.104), and not one that is attempted here. However, there are two core assumptions of agenda setting theory that are particularly pertinent to the emergence of social media; these are introduced below.

Two assumptions of agenda setting: causation and consensus

Two related assumptions are intrinsic to McCombs and Shaws seminal agenda setting study, as well as the many others that follow it. Firstly, McCombs and

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Shaw are explicit in their assumption that the mass media causes the public to think about some political issues over others. Finding a very strong correlation of +.967 between the issues covered by the media and those deemed important by citizens, McCombs and Shaw state that the media appear to have exerted a considerable impact on what [citizens] considered the major issues (1972, p.180). Of course, no matter how strong, correlation cannot necessarily account for the direction of hypothesised causality. Indeed, while some later studies have used more sophisticated research techniques to establish causation concretely, including longitudinal data collection and experimental programs (Iyengar and Kinder, 2010), overall few agenda-setting studies have been designed so that the causal ordering is unambiguous (Kosicki, 1993, p.107). Moreover, some studies have indeed found that causality can indeed flow in the other direction, from the public to the media, and in both directions (Demers, Craff, Choi and Pessen, 1989; Erbring, Goldenburg, and Miller, 1980). Overall, however, this assumption of causation, central to the agenda setting hypothesis, has been borne out by a large body of evidence from mass media landscapes. More than thirty years after the original study, Maxwell McCombs noted in a review of agenda setting theory that The general proposition supported by this accumulation of evidence about agenda-setting effects is that journalists do significantly influence their audiences picture of the world (2004, p.19). The second assumption at the heart of agenda setting theory emerges from the idea that the mass media drives consensus on what issues are discussed in society at large. This consensus-building power is an important social function of the mass media, offering the public at large a shared set of issues, and criteria for developing substantive opinions on these issues (McCombs and Shaw, 1993). Yet underpinning this concept is the assumption that the mass media itself achieves consensus on which issues are to be broadcast to the public. Put another way, agenda setting theorists typically assume that the public is exposed to a uniform agenda across traditional media platforms.

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As the next section explains, the accuracy of both assumptions are challenged by the emergence of the Internet and social media.

The impact of the Internet on agenda setting theory

The rapid adoption of the Internet as an information and communication technology provokes questions about the continued relevance and accuracy of agenda setting theory. This section discusses the threat that various manifestations of Internet technology present to the assumptions described above. The arrival of the Internet was initially greeted with considerable enthusiasm regarding its potential to create more open, deliberative societies, with a more egalitarian distribution of the power to speak. A landmark 1997 court ruling epitomised the prevailing view of the Internet as a fundamentally different and revolutionary technology. Unlike restrictions on broadcast media aimed at protecting minors, the Internet could not be subject to blanket regulation, as it could hardly be considered a scare expressive commodity. Instead, the dynamic, multifaceted category of communication meant that anyone could become a pamphleteer or a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox (Reno, 1997, 58). The Internet, then, has given individuals access to a global audience (Iyengar, 2011), creating a new and different information environment that has unsettled traditional political information structures (Benkler, 2006, p.242; Rogers, 2004, p.3). The alleged structural transformation that the Internet has wrought might be interpreted as posing a significant threat to the gatekeeping role played by journalists and news organisations as the sole or primary producers of news items, weakening their influence in setting the public agenda. With the potential for the public to become much more omnivorous consumers of more diverse content online, Blumer and Kavanagh argue that the presumption of mass exposure to relatively uniform political content, which has underpinned agenda setting can no longer be taken for granted (1999, p.221). Williams and Delli Carpini in 2000 went so far as to claim the virtual elimination of the 14

gatekeeping role of the mainstream press if there are no gates [online] there can be no gatekeepers (2000, p.61). These arguments would seem to strike at the core of the various assumptions underpinning agenda setting theory. McCombs and Shaw may have been right in assuming that the sum total of nine media sources was a suitably accurate view of the entire mass media landscape to which residents were exposed in 1968. However, the media landscape has fragmented to the extent that even simply measuring the range of different outlets that todays average Internet user is exposed to is a difficult task. Measuring the agenda setting effects of these sources might be harder still, and the assumption of consensus amongst these more diverse outlets regarding which issues to cover, for example may no longer be taken for granted. Moreover, the potential for online platforms to open up myriad forms of communication, not merely from writer to reader but between the two, cast doubt on the straightforward causal flow of the agenda setting effects found in a traditional mass media landscape. If greater interaction has become possible between news professionals and the people formerly known as the audience (Rosen, 2006) then these respective roles may blur. This blurring has taken many forms, including citizen journalism, in which ordinary people take an active role in reporting news and multimedia to news organisations. This study, however, looks at a more indirect and nuanced form of citizen-media intermingling, as described below. In reality, however, a number of empirical studies of various online communication platforms have demonstrated that early visions of the Internets revolutionary potential may have been somewhat misplaced, suggesting in turn that the mass medias agenda setting influence remains a significant phenomenon. An early example of such a study was Roberts et als (2002) investigation into political discussion on electronic bulletin boards, online discussion forums that the researchers used as their surrogate for the public agenda. For three of the four political issues measured, the study found a

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statistically significant correlation between mass media coverage of an issue and subsequent discussion of that issue online. The study therefore found a clear agenda setting relationship media coverage provided a stimulus for discussion of issues on the Internet (p.459). Thus the causal role that mass media outlets play in pushing coverage of certain issues at certain times can be seen to impact upon discussions in this online communicative environment. Other studies of discussion boards show similar effects, including a study of a Korean election (Kim, 2003), although each study may in part reflect different cultural contexts (Takeshita, 2005, p.287). Another study found that even when a news site hosts its own discussion board, the ability for ordinary contributors to take an interactive role in the news-making process is firmly limited. None of the boards studied found evidence of journalists becoming involved in discussions; instead, editors would occasionally selected and promoted favourite posts, which if anything appears a reassertion rather than a relinquishing of gatekeeping control. Another prominent platform for democratic deliberation online is the blogosphere. Blogging became a popular platform for political writing as content management systems became more accessible in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and blogs about politics are some of the most popular in the genre (Hargittai et al, 2008). Political blogs typically feature regular posting of news and opinion by a whole range of users, from famous journalists to ordinary members of the public. Anyone can therefore start a blog and have their say: Chadwick notes that the explosion of blogging has democratised access to the tools and techniques required to make a political difference through content creation (2006, p.129). If more people are contributing political content as well as or instead of consuming it the threat to a mass media landscape that promotes consensus in society is evident. The blogosphere is however subject to a number of technological and social dynamics that limit its potential as a more diverse and egalitarian environment for political discourse. In The Myth of Digital Democracy (2008), Matthew

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Hindman forcefully puts forward these limitations. Hindman argues that far from elite gatekeepers becoming extinct, the Internet has facilitated the rise of a new set of elite bloggers who are, if anything, more elitist and less representative of the public at large than even op-ed columnists at traditional newspapers (p.126). This blogging elite are also easily distinguishable by the sheer levels of traffic they enjoy compared with less popular bloggers. Using data from a blog tracking service, Hindman notes that of the five thousand sampled, the top ten blogs accounted for 48 percent of total traffic. Hindman concludes that it may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard (p.142), suggesting that although content creation may be manifestly easier online, exclusivity and hierarchy remain. Very few new voices have found any influence through blogging. Hindmans argument is supported by a study by Singer (2005), which looked directly at journalists use of the blogging platform. Singer found that journalists are normalising blogs to existing industrial practices, most notably by remaining steadfastly at the gate of information flow in this new medium (p.183). Only two of the ten political blogs associated with national news organisations offered any facility for user input, surprising given that blogging is usually seen as a highly interactive format. Moreover, the study found that a large majority of the hyperlinks contained in the blog posts linked to other media organisations, suggesting that these journalist bloggers are retaining their traditional journalistic gatekeeping role by incorporating limited or no material from users (p.189). All in all, then, large-scale studies on the blogosphere support the notion that journalists retain control over the authorship of their blogs, and do not use the more interactive aspects of blogging, such as user comments or external hyperlinks, to engender a more open news-making process. The examples of discussion boards and blogs noted here suggest that in practice, the Internet has often struggled to live up to the optimistic potential for democratic discourse that its early admirers predicted for it. On these particular online platforms, therefore, traditional agenda setters such as media

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organisations and journalists continue to play a highly influential role. However, as the Internet is an ever-evolving and highly adaptable technology, other online platforms may prove more conducive to the involvement of more voices and a modification of the traditional agenda setting dynamics of the mass communication era.

Twitter and agenda setting

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, such as more immersive social networks like Facebook and more flexible devices like mobile phones, have brought renewed focus on the user as creator and consumer of content. Emblematic of these trends is Twitter. Unlike the blogosphere, which was in practice a set of discrete web sites which could only be brought together by third party services such as RSS readers, on Twitter both the medium and the message look the same no matter the user. All messages, or tweets, are limited to 140 characters, and appear in a stream ordered only by the time they were sent. All tweets are by default visible to the entire network, and any user can interact with any other, regardless of whether they follow each other, by using the @reply function. Twitter offers additional functions that promote interaction and conversation among its users. The retweet function allows a user to rebroadcast another users tweets to their own network of followers. Whilst this is often interpreted as an implicit endorsement for [the] message and sender (Bruns and Burgess, 2012, p.803), many prominent Twitter users have adopted the mantra that retweets do not imply endorsement in their biography. Regardless of interpretation, the tangible result of a retweet is that specific content is replicated and disseminated to a new audience. Moreover, the emergence of hashtags brief descriptions of the subject of a tweet has created a further subdivision of the Twitter network. Hashtags can be entered as search queries, which means users can be exposed to the views of users who they do not necessarily follow. When using a hashtag, users may therefore be attempting to address an imagined community of users, and the ability to rapidly form 18

discursive communities around breaking news underlies Twitters recognition a platform for news dissemination and discussion (Bruns and Burgess, 2012, p.804). Given the strong foundations for interactivity that these functions provide, it is not surprising that journalists are among those who have enthusiastically adopted Twitter for a range of purposes, including promoting their work and keeping up with news more widely (Ahmad, 2010; Farhi, 2009; Hermida, 2010a). Not only journalists but ordinary members of the public are using Twitter to spread news both directly and indirectly and to discuss it; Kwak et al (2010) found that 85% of top trends (the most discussed terms on the network) are news-related. In summary, Hermida concludes that broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on communication systems like Twitter, are creating new kinds of interactions around the news (2010 p.298). These interactions have been examined in a number of empirical studies. Anstead and OLoughlin have described an emerging viewertariat: the section of a live television audience which responds to programming on-screen (2010, p.4). Measuring Twitter users interaction with the British political debate programme Question Time, Anstead and OLoughlin speculated that use of Twitter in this context would create new dynamics and modes of [political] participation among citizens (p.17). Similarly, Shamma et als (2009) analysis of Twitter usage during a 2008 US presidential debate found engagement among users with the topics being discussed on screen. These studies have tended to assume for the purposes of analysis that all users accounts on Twitter are created equal. In the context of agenda setting theory, however, the fact that each user is broadcasting to a different number of followers is highly significant. Matthew Hindmans warning that on the Internet there is a difference between speaking and being heard (2009, p.13) is thus an important consideration in the context of Twitter. Indeed, the tendencies of the mass media landscape towards concentration and filtering could threaten to affect the Twitter platform as well. Because journalists are already well-

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established before they join Twitter, their reputation is likely to earn them significantly more followers than ordinary users who are expressing themselves for the first time, in a rich get richer fashion (Lasorsa, 2012). Once on the network, their experience, access and expertise may well attract more users still. If, hypothetically, the most popular political tweeters prove to be members of the traditional media elite journalists, broadcasters and opinion leaders then claims of a fragmented media landscape in the Internet age may not be as threatening to the standard agenda setting process as first thought. Takeshita identifies a hierarchy of attention amongst news websites, and asks: Can we assume that the major news sites on the Internet are a kind of extension of the traditional news media and that the agenda-setting and consensus-building functions of the mass media persist? (2005, p.287) The same rationale might apply to Twitter. If it can be shown that the most popular Twitter users are members of, or at any rate resemble, the traditional news media, the ability of this media elite to set the public agenda and build societal consensus would seem unaffected by the emergence of social media platforms. Gauging who the most popular Twitter users in a political context are and whether they belong to the traditional media elite is therefore a central focus of research in this study. Yet even if, as hypothesised, news professionals make up a significant proportion of the most popular Twitter accounts in the context of political debate, this is no guarantee that these users utilise Twitter in the same way as traditional broadcast and print media platforms. In particular, the forms and functions specific to Twitter may be facilitating a change in how news is made, in regard to the gatekeeping role that news professionals traditionally perform. In a broadcast media setting, journalists routinely conform to a shared station style (Bell, 1991), whereas Twitter necessitates a more complex, but potentially more fulsome presentation of self to multiple diverse audiences (Marwick and boyd, 2010). Hence journalists might be rebroadcasting news and views from other users through the retweet function, for example, or using tweets to post links to

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other content produced by non-professionals. This could be a particularly transformative phenomenon within particular cultures, for example in the context of British journalists, who have traditionally sought to avoid being accused of presenting issues they personally deemed significant (Gurevitch and Blumer, 1982). Twitter might provide a more effective outlet for the expression of the personal views of both individual journalists and those who interact with them. On the other hand, it might be suggested that news professionals have even more control over the content they publish on Twitter than in the traditional newsroom setting, in which they must contend with editors and often the commercial and ideological interests of owners. Thus Bruns and Burgess argue that by filtering and selecting what tweets to publish, [a journalists] gatekeeper role is maintained and enforced (p.300). This chimes with Hindmans insight that the Internet generally is shifting the bar of exclusivity from the production to the filtering of political information (2009, p.13). Another crucial question in this study, therefore, is to what extent members of the media elite on Twitter are involving other, newer voices in the content they post on the platform. Evidence of this could be interpreted as a reversal of the traditional direction of causation in agenda setting theory. In this section, two assumptions at the heart of agenda setting theory were introduced, before an explanation of the challenges that the Internet and social media posed to these assumptions. Directions for specific research were then suggested. Table A below provides a summary of the theory, challenges and research strategy introduced in this section.

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Table A: linking theory to research Theoretical assumption The mass media drive consensus on issues discussed in society Challenge to theory presented by the Internet and social media The online media landscape is fragmented and diverse, so public exposure to traditional media consensus may no longer be guaranteed Internet technology offers much greater interaction between news professionals and their audiences Research strategy

Find out who the most popular users are and whether the traditional media is represented Investigate whether the technological functions of social media are being used to enhance interaction

Agenda setting effects flow from the media to the public

Evidently, empirical research is needed to investigate the continued relevance of agenda setting theory in the transformative landscape of social media, of which Twitter offers a prominent and important example. The research questions listed below are derived from and designed to address the issues raised in this section. Before that, however, a description of the political context within which this study takes place is necessary.

Political Context
The setting for the empirical research in this study was the UK Parliament. Data was collected during three parliamentary sessions during April and May 2013. These included two editions of the high-profile Prime Ministers Questions (PMQs), a weekly forum for MPs from both the government and assorted opposition parties to ask questions of the Prime Minister. Such sessions seem especially likely to offer an introduction of the issues that are important to policy makers (Soroka, 2002, p. 272). Whilst government and opposition are allowed to ask a roughly similar number of questions, PMQs sessions offer an opportunity to the Leader of the Opposition, the largest party outside

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government, to speak on equal terms with the Prime Minister, with six questions guaranteed to him each week. Typically the Leader of the Opposition will use these questions to force the Prime Minister to state an opinion about issues the minister would often prefer not to voice an opinion about, as the issue at hand may be unpleasant or inconvenient (Walgrave, 2009, p.2). In this way, then, the Leader of the Opposition has the opportunity to put issues on the policy agenda and particularly since the session is now broadcast live, he might hope to influence the media agenda too. Prior evidence for the ability of political leaders to directly set the media agenda through live broadcast events is mixed, and seems to be based on contextual factors; different studies reached conflicting conclusions regarding an American Presidents ability to set the media agenda through the annual State of the Union speech (Gilberg et al, 1991; McCombs, 2004). However, only one of the three parliamentary sessions under analysis here was an orthodox PMQs session pitting Prime Minister David Cameron against Leader of the Opposition Labour party Ed Miliband. The second session was in effect Deputy Prime Ministers Questions, as due to absence Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg stepped in to take questions from Labours Deputy Leader Harriet Harman. Nevertheless, the dynamics of this exchange would likely prove similar to a typical PMQs, in the sense that the opposition sets the policy agenda of the day by asking questions of the government. The third session for which data was collected was fundamentally different. The annual Queens Speech sees the monarch attend Parliament to read out the governments legislative agendas for the coming year, and in stark contrast to PMQs, no interruptions or contradictions are broached by Her Majesty. For the Queens Speech, therefore, the tables are turned: it is the government, not the opposition, who gets to set the policy agenda if not for the year, at least for the day.

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The distinct characteristics of each session provide an opportunity to strengthen the findings of this study. Evidence gathered over the course of multiple similar yet distinct news events, a set of individual case studies (Robson, 2002), allows a more fine-grained analysis. Similarities and differences that arise between the cases may be related to particular modulations of the agenda setting process. For example, given its ceremonial nature and the prominence of a non-partisan figure, the Queens Speech might invite proportionally less commentary from standard political commentators, and the overall tone of the discussion on Twitter might be less political than for the nakedly partisan question time sessions. Conversely, if certain findings emerge from all three sessions, this may strengthen claims to generalisability. This political context is an important frame for the subsequent analysis. Empirical research, by definition, cannot take place in a vacuum, and the specifics of this study mean that generalising to other political systems or cultures may be problematic. However, outside of elections, political coverage of British politics peaks weekly with Prime Ministers Questions and yearly with the Queens Speech, both in overall media coverage and on Twitter (for reference, see Appendix A, which shows that various relevant topics appear in Twitters UK Top Trends list during the course of the respective events). Such a high-profile political context provides fertile ground for empirical research into the dynamics of agenda setting on Twitter.

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Research Questions
The following research questions reflect the research strategy outlined above. RQ1: Among those who comment on live political events, which Twitter users have the largest audience? Do these users belong to traditional media outlets? RQ2: Is this traditional media elite using the functions and norms of Twitter to involve other, non-professional users in their reporting on the platform?

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Research Methods
Design
The primary source of empirical data for this study was tweets sent during three parliamentary sessions that took place in April and May 2013. These tweets were collected for content analysis of both quantitative and qualitative aspects of their content. The first agenda setting study compared a content analysis of media sources with survey data from members of the public, looking for correlation between the issues covered (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Such was the seminal influence of this approach that agenda setting is closely identified with this specific research design (Rogers et al 1993, p.79). However, scholars have since started to break out of the McCombs-and-Shaw-style methodological mode (Rogers et al, 1993, p79; see for example Iyengar et al, 2010, Rogers et al., 1991). Various research designs are thus considered acceptable as forms of agenda setting research, particularly in order to make research consistent with new information environments. This study follows from the work discussed in the previous section, but differs from standard agenda setting research in that it does not explicitly seek to detect effects in the interaction between the media and the public. Instead, it is designed as an exploratory study, probing whether the conditions for agenda setting effects exist in a social media environment. As the research questions indicate, this is achieved by investigating whether members of the traditional media have a prominent place in the hierarchy of attention on Twitter, and whether and how these users utilise functions specific to the platform to incorporate non-traditional voices in their output. The findings from this

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investigation allow a more informed discussion about whether agenda setting dynamics are likely to subsist in the social media era, and set up the foundations for future work. Content analysis is an appropriate method for the purposes of this study for many reasons. It is, or should be, systematic and replicable, reinforcing its external validity (Krippendorf, 2012). It is suitable as a method for parsing the meaning and nature of messages, something undertaken here (Weber, 1990). Content analysis is usually used to establish the nature of [an] agenda (Gunter, 2000, p.197) and is suitable as a means of analysing the dynamic communication environment of the web (McMillan, p.91). The following section introduces the dataset on which content analysis was performed.

Data collection and sampling

Twitter data was downloaded via the Twitter Streaming API for three periods during the high-profile House of Commons sessions in April and May 2013. In each case, data was collected and recorded 15 minutes before the start and 30 minutes after the end of the parliamentary session. During these time periods, tweets were collected if they contained the keyword PMQs on 24th April and 15th May and QueensSpeech on 8th May. These searches were case insensitive and included tweets using the hashtag #PMQs and #QueensSpeech respectively. Observation of Twitters Top Trends demonstrated unequivocally that these keywords were used prolifically during the data collection period: by the end of each parliamentary event, the respective hashtags were either the top or second on the list of trends (see Appendix A). In total, 15,694 tweets were collected across the three sessions. Table B below outlines the data collection undertaken.

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Table B: data collection summary

Type of session Prime Ministers Questions Keyword used for collection PMQs Date and time of debate 12:0012:30, 24th April 2013 Time of data collection 11:451300, 24th April 2013 Key protagonists David Cameron (Prime Minister) and Ed Miliband (Leader of the Opposition) HM Queen Elizabeth II Total tweets collected 4955

The Queens Speech (Deputy) Prime Ministers Questions

QueensSpeech PMQs

11:3411:43, 8th May 2013 12:0012:30, 15th May 2013

11:1912:13, 8th May 2013 11:451300, 15th May 2013

6441

Nick Clegg 4258 (Deputy Prime Minister) and Harriet Harman (Deputy Leader of the Labour Party)

Once all the tweets had been collected, a non-random sample was constructed on the basis of relevance sampling. Metadata downloaded with each tweet was analysed in order to identify and isolate the Twitter users with the largest audience. Krippendorff notes that relevance sampling aims at selecting all textual units that contribute to answering given research questions [by] examining the texts to be analysed, if only superficially (2012, p.120). This approach was followed here. Tweets were separated into two groups on the basis of whether their author had more or less than 3000 followers. The baseline of 3000 followers was derived iteratively from the data. For the purpose of a fair comparison between the different sessions, the threshold needed to be the same for each session in absolute rather than relative terms (i.e. 28

a number rather than a proportion) to take into account real-life variations across the sessions. As Table C below shows, using 3000 followers as the common threshold meant that, for each week, between 8.65 and 13.5% of users were isolated in this way. Thus Twitter users with 3000 or more followers were in at least the 87th, 91st or 86th percentile for each session respectively. Table C: classifying popular users Data collection period 24/04 08/05 15/05 % (number) of tweets sent by users with less than 3000 followers 87.1% (4332) 91.35% (5884) 86.5% (3682) % (number) of tweets sent by users with more than 3000 followers 12.9% (643) 8.65% (557) 13.5% (576)

Clearly, any attempt to isolate users with the largest audience in this manner will be somewhat artificial, and relevance sampling selects data in a way not yet addressed by statistical sampling theory (Krippendorff, 2012, p.120). However, 3,000 followers is a sensible threshold, as reflected both in the data and in outside research which suggests that the average Twitter user has 208 followers (Beevolve, 2012). Moreover, following this numerical segregation, a more sensitive, qualitative coding approach was adopted through content analysis, as described in the following section.

Analytical approach
Content analysis proceeded in two stages. The first stage involved the coding of the Twitter users identified as having a large audience of 3,000 or more followers. These users were coded for whether or not they belonged to a national newspaper or broadcasting corporation, based upon the users Bio, the section of a users profile in which he or she can describe himself or herself in 160 characters or less; this group is referred to as the media elite. This Bio section is delivered as metadata attached to every tweet via the Twitter Streaming API, which simplified the coding process. Thus the unit of analysis for this aspect was the individual Twitter users.

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This coding schedule meant that the editors of popular Internet-only political news websites, such as Guido Fawkes (101,000 Twitter followers) and Paul Waugh, the Editor-in-Chief of PoliticsHome (40,000 followers) were excluded from the media elite. Certainly, these commentators occupy a grey area between the traditional media and the general public, enjoying an audience of followers almost as large as the circulation of some national newspapers without being associated with a traditional media organisation. However, this study explicitly examines the presence of traditional media professionals on Twitter in order to draw direct comparisons with the old mass media landscape, so excluding popular but non-traditional Twitter users was an important decision. This methodological choice also added simplicity and legitimacy to the content analysis, as identifying traditional national media organisations can be done simply and objectively given their finite number, whereas defining what constitutes a news or politics website would be much more complex and contentious. For the second stage of the coding process, the unit of analysis was individual tweets. Comparisons were drawn between the use of retweets and links in the tweets sent among three different groups, to allow greater insight into how these groups were using the functions of Twitter. The first group was those users with 3,000 followers or more who were coded in the first stage as working for newspapers and broadcasting corporations, as detailed above. The second group was constituted of all currently-serving Members of the UK House of Commons (MPs), however many followers they had, as well as a small set of official Twitter channels of national UK parties. This group, defined for the purposes of the analysis as the political elite, was constructed to provide an additional point of comparison to the media elite in terms of the use of Twitter functions. The political elite, as custodians of what is referred to in the literature as the policy agenda, is typically distinguished from both the media elite and the public in agenda setting typologies (Rogers and Dearing, 1988; Takeshita, 2005). It was therefore important to do so for this study too, particularly given the highly political context of the data collected. The third group was simply all

30

remaining users: members of the public as well as highly followed users not coded as members of the traditional media elite. With these groups defined, the second stage of content analysis involved coding the entire corpus of tweet text for a number of characteristics. Due to various technical specifications and social conventions on Twitter, systematically identifying various characteristics in tweet text was straightforward. Twitter etiquette dictates, for example, that users write RT to signify that they are quoting another user, whilst since 2011, all links posted in tweets are automatically converted into the http://t.co format. Calculating the use of retweets and links amongst the body of tweets could therefore be conducted automatically, by compiling lists of tweets containing these characteristics.

Research ethics
For this study, a CUREC form was completed and approved, following reference to an authoritative text reviewing the ethics of Internet research (Eynon, 2008). The methods used here do not raise substantial ethical issues, in part because content analysis is an inherently unobtrusive method (Bryman, 2012). All data gathered from Twitter for analysis in this study was available in the public domain and sent by users who publish tweets publically; tweets sent by users with a private setting were not (and could not have been) collected through the Twitter Streaming API.

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Findings and discussion

The most popular Twitter users: who are they and who do they work for?
The first research question asked about the most followed Twitter users. Do they belong predominantly to the traditional media elite, or is it evident that a new group of users including, perhaps, online reporters and commentators has emerged? As described in the Methods section, all users with more than 3,000 followers whose tweets were collected during the sampling period were content analysed. Specifically, the Bio text on their profile was coded for whether or not it made reference to the user belonging to a newspaper or broadcast network. Figures A1, A2 and A3 summarise the results of this content analysis, showing for each data collection period the proportion of users who were coded as belonging to the media elite and political elite groups compared with those who were not.

Figure A1: coding elites (24th April)

Members of media elite

Members of political elite

Others 0.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% 80.00% 100.00%

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Figure A2 coding elites (8th May)

Members of media elite

Members of political elite

Other 0.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% 80.00% 100.00%

Figure A3: coding elites (15th May)

Members of media elite

Members of political elite

Other 0.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% 80.00% 100.00%

The results of this content analysis are ambivalent and vary between the three sessions. The results for 24th April (Figure A1) show that this was the most elitedominated parliamentary session on Twitter. Nearly a third of users with more than 3,000 followers who used the phrase PMQs in tweets sent during the session were employees of a small handful of news organisations such as the BBC, ITN, the Independent and the Spectator. They were joined by the nearly quarter of users who form the political elite sitting Members of Parliament and official party accounts.

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The results for this session provide the most compelling evidence for the argument that conditions on social media platforms like Twitter facilitate rather than undermine the agenda-setting and consensus-forming functions of the traditional mass media. If more than half of all the users transmitting to an audience of at least 3,000 other users belong either to the small number of national old media organisations or to the upper echelons of the political elite, this suggests the potential, albeit specific to this political context, for these groups to continue to set the agenda in a manner not dissimilar to the mass media landscape of twenty or thirty years ago. Communication platforms like Twitter in theory allow consumers far wider and freer choice in who they take news and opinion from. From the experience of the parliamentary debate on 24th April, however, it appears that a majority of the most popular news reporting and political comment emerges from representatives of the traditional media. Moreover, among all users with over 3,000 followers, the tweets sent by the media elite were sent to significantly more followers than tweets sent by others. Figure B shows the median number of followers for tweets sent by each group during the three data collection periods.

Figure B: median followers

Data collection period

24-Apr Media elite 8-May Political elite Other 15-May

5000 10000 Median number of followers

15000

Figure B shows that of the most popular Twitter accounts, members of the traditional elite had the most followers on average for each period of data 34

collection. Median values are used here, as the mean calculations were skewed by a small number of hugely-followed media organisations such as the BBC Breaking News account, which has over 5 million followers. This evidence reinforces the notion that professional news organisations and individuals retain a prominent place on the Twitter platform, underlining their continued agenda setting and consensus-building influence. However, the divergent results from the other two sessions, shown in Figures A2 and A3, offer a different perspective. For 8th May in particular, the influence wielded by the old media elite is much less pronounced, constituting only around 12% of the total users who sent a tweet about the Queens Speech to 3,000 or more followers. Clearly there are contextual differences to consider here. As noted above, the Queens Speech was a very atypical news event, as it included much more ceremony than ordinary parliamentary sessions and proportionally less politics. The presence of the Queen, in particular, brought other popular Twitter users into the debate, such as well-established non-political users. These included both the official channel of the British Monarchy which has over half a million followers, and the spoof @Queen_UK account, an account with more than a million followers that certainly provided a lighter touch to the proceedings. Because of the substantial variation in the findings for each of the parliamentary sessions, it is difficult to offer concrete, generalised conclusions from this section of the study. What can be said at this juncture, however, is that in every instance for which data was collected and analysed, messages sent by a very small group of traditional news professionals are among the most viewed messages on the platform. Whilst their popularity appears to wax and wane from week to week, there can be little doubt that the conditions exist on a social media platform like Twitter for media organisations to continue to play a significant role in setting the agenda. What these primarily descriptive findings do not do, however, is offer any account of how the traditional media are using the platform. This section has offered evidence of a continuing role for the traditional media in setting the

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agenda on a social media platform; it bears asking next whether the technological functions unique to Twitter are facilitating any change in the way in which this role is performed. This question is taken up in the following subsection of the findings.

Retweeting, linking, and the gatekeeping role on Twitter

The second research question in this study asked whether and to what extent journalists and news organisations are using the distinctive functions of Twitter to adapt their standard agenda setting role by bringing other users into their reporting on the platform. Such a finding, albeit preliminary, would suggest that news professionals are relinquishing the gatekeeping function that they enjoyed exclusively in the mass media age. As such, this section reports findings from analysis of the use of two functions on Twitter, retweets and links, to see whether news professionals are adapting their role in this way. One of the most notable features of Twitter is the retweeting function, which allows a user to in effect rebroadcast the message of another user to their own network. If journalists were relinquishing the gatekeeping role they enjoyed exclusively in the mass media landscape, we might expect to see prominent use of retweets to bring other voices into the mainstream. This could prove an important phenomenon, as journalists and news organisations many of whom enjoy a large and loyal network of followers carried over from other platforms like television and newspapers in principle have the power to amplify other voices by several degrees of magnitude through the retweet function. Whilst it has already been noted that many Twitter users carry disclaimers on their profile denying that a retweet necessarily amounts to endorsement, ultimately, whether they approve of it or not, any retweet by a journalist or news organisation results in their own audience being exposed to an external fact or opinion. Retweeting therefore stands as an important proxy for the relinquishing of the gatekeeping role on Twitter. If retweeting is found to be a prevalent practice amongst news professionals on Twitter, then there may exist the potential for a shift in the flow of agenda setting dynamics towards a more reciprocal, bilateral process, in the context of social media.

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The findings suggest, however, that the media elite does not appear fond of bringing outside voices into the mainstream through the retweet function. Figure C shows the percentage of tweets which were retweets of other users for three groups. The media elite and political elite are identical to the groups of the same name in first section of the analysis. The public group here, however, contains not only all users with less than 3,000 followers, but also users with more than 3,000 followers who were not coded as belonging to the media elite or political elite and were listed as other in the preceding analysis.

Figure C: retweets as percentage of tweets

Data collection period

24-Apr 08-May 15-May Public Overall 0.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% Percentage of tweets which were retweets Media elite Political elite

As Figure C shows, the tendency to retweet was consistently lowest amongst news professionals across the three sessions, even as the levels of retweets shifted quite considerably for each group between the three sessions. This data can be interpreted in a number of ways. The overall amount of retweeting by the media elite is somewhat higher than that reported for previous studies: Lasorsa et al (2012), for example, collected Twitter data from the 500 most popular American journalists and found that only 15% of the tweets from their sample were retweets. Indeed, the fact around one fifth of all messages sent by this elite group were not words that they themselves had written offers at least some evidence of a relinquishing of the gatekeeping role.

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In comparison to other online platforms, too, this finding appears positive. Singers investigation into American blogs found that on a national level journalists remain steadfastly at the gate with nine out of ten journalism blogs containing no evidence of user input (2005, p.185). Whilst not a perfect comparison, this suggests that journalists are at least somewhat more willing or able to incorporate other perspectives via Twitters retweet function. Clearly, however, in direct comparison to the political elite and general public on Twitter, journalists and news organisations perform poorly on the retweet metric. Given that news professionals have shown at least some appetite to retweet content from other users, an important question is exactly who these users are retweeting, and whose perspective they are thus rebroadcasting to their own large audiences. Table D addresses this question by showing, for each group, where the original retweet came from, combining data from all three data collection periods. Table D: origins of retweets media elite political elite public Total Media elite RTs of 54.8% 10.7% 34.5% 100% Political elite RTs of 15.5% 40.5% 44% 100% Public RTs of 16% 9.9% 74.0% 100%

This table shows that over half of the tweets retweeted by members of the media elite themselves emerged from their own very select group of journalists, commentators and news desks. It is important to bear in mind the small size of this group, which varied between 34 and 70 members across the three sessions, a tiny fraction of the thousands of other users also seeking to enter the discussion. To the question of how many new voices are being given larger audiences on Twitter, this is therefore a clear-cut answer. News professionals are not using the retweet function to incorporate new voices nearly as much as they are perpetuating traditional mass media patterns by rebroadcasting the reporting of industry colleagues and rivals. The earlier point that around one

38

fifth of tweets by the media elite incorporated external content therefore needs to be qualified by this more finely-grained finding. These findings would likely have been less equivocal were it not for the narrow definition of what constitutes the media elite. As specified above, a Twitter user could only be defined as belonging to the media elite if they were associated with a traditional media organisation. Because of this strict definition, many users who perhaps could have been defined as the media elite were instead defined as the public. Had a broader definition of the media elite been applied, the findings would have likely shown an even more modest incorporation of ordinary members of the public in political discourse by the media elite on Twitter. Alongside retweets, links are another method for content delivery on Twitter. Due especially to the limits on message length, hyperlinks have become popular on Twitter for delivering text, video and other multimedia from one user to another. Twitter even allows a user to preview photos and articles from within the news stream. As part of the study, a content analysis was conducted on all the links sent by the elite media group during the course of the data collection periods. In total this yielded 54 links. These links were analysed for whether or not they pointed to the website of the organisation that the user was associated to. Table E below shows these results. Table E: target location of links Links pointing to users/organisations own website 81.4% (44) Links pointing to external content 18.6% (10)

Links included in tweets by media elite (n=54)

The table shows that, as with retweets, there is scant evidence of media professionals using links as a means of rebroadcasting outside views to their own large audiences. Only ten of the 54 links analysed pointed anywhere other than the website of the users own news organisation. Of these ten, five linked to a website hosting the digital copy of an election brochure referred to in the parliamentary session, and one linked to an article on a parliamentary news 39

website. These findings mimics Singers analysis of journalistic blogs, which found that the overwhelming majority of links led to other mainstream media sites (2005, p.187) journalists on Twitter are evidently following the same usage pattern, with if anything an even more singular focus on linking to their own or their organisations own content. These findings on retweets and links are not presented as normatively positive or negative, and indeed could be the result of perfectly understandable editorial judgment: journalists have an obligation to uphold professional standards, and with the power of gatekeeping comes the expectation of integrity and reliability in reporting. Moreover, the sample of data used is relatively small and may be dependent on the political and professional context: it is not surprising that journalists use the platform partly for promotion of their own work, and the economics of modern news production mean that posting links to rival sites might not be looked upon favourably. Yet whether it is because of selfpromotion, professional rivalry or anything else, these explanations this should not obscure the fact that, on a communication platform which facilitates the rapid, easy sharing of content from user to user, news professionals are demonstrably not utilising this function to bring outside voices into their output. The gatekeeping role, therefore, does not seem like it is being relinquished, and the prospect for a more reciprocal process of news formation in a social media environment does not from this evidence appear likely. The core assumption of a causal flow from the media to the public in agenda setting theory is not discredited by the empirical evidence from the social media setting and political context analysed here.

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Conclusion
The research undertaken in this study focussed on two questions. Firstly, is the theoretical assumption that mass media can drive consensus in society being undermined by the presence of myriad new voices in more open accessible communication environments online? The evidence in answer to this question was mixed. From one perspective, social media platforms like Twitter have clearly made it much easier for users not part of the traditional media elite to attract an audience. However, when only looking at users with more than a certain threshold of followers, the picture becomes blurrier. There clearly is a hierarchy of interest (Takeshita, 2005) within British political discourse on Twitter and traditional media organisations are disproportionately well represented amongst this most popular group. The existence of other, newer voices, however amounting to more than 80% of large-audience Twitter accounts in one instance cannot be ignored, and the core theoretical assumption that citizens are exposed to relatively uniform political content is by no means guaranteed in the era of social media. Overall, however, these findings necessitate a reticent response to the first research question, and indeed it will be interesting to see going forward whether or not the media landscape on Twitter fragments further. Given the existence of a prominent if not totally dominant presence for traditional media elites in political debate on Twitter, the second focus of research was on whether and how these news professionals were utilising the in-built functions of the platform to bring a wider range of voices into their reporting on the platform. The findings for this area of study were much clearer. The results show in fairly unequivocal terms that the media elite is failing to use these functions effectively or regularly. In the case of retweeting, news 41

professionals appear largely unwilling to relinquish the control over the gatekeeping process retained from the mass communication era by rebroadcasting the news and views of other voices to their own follower lists, instead focussing content produced by fellow news professionals. In the case of hyperlinks, too, most of these redirect web browsers back to the website of the users own organisation, with little evidence of either cross-fertilisation among the news organisations or the involvement of content outside the mainstream. Even given the potential for more fluid, less hierarchical information flows on the Internet, the core theoretical assumption that agenda setting effects flow from the media to the public is by no means disproven by this research. There are of course reasons for caution about the breadth of applicability of these findings. The research undertaken in this study took place in a specific political, institutional and technological context. Yet the context chosen was a prominent, high-profile and arguably influential one. It will be interesting to see whether future research investigating similar effects in different contexts strengthens or constrains the findings reported here. The rapid adoption of new communication platforms utilising ever more advanced Internet technology will also necessitate future research specific to these new communication environments. This study has built upon descriptive and exploratory research to offer a preliminary view of how the structures and institutions of traditional mass media have adapted to the rapid adoption of social media platforms. It has found that, overall, news organisations and journalists occupy a somewhat awkward position on the social media platform Twitter. They have become proportionally smaller fish in a relatively larger pond, competing with exponentially more sources of news and views on platforms which offers audiences more choice in who to read. Nonetheless, these traditional media elites have largely maintained their elite status, remaining some of the most popular outlets on the platform. Moreover, they seem unwilling to relinquish the gatekeeping role inherited from the pre-Internet landscape by incorporating external perspectives in their own online activity. This suggests that their powerful influence in setting the agenda

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has the potential to continue, albeit in a moderated manner, into the foreseeable future.

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Appendices
Appendix A: Top Trends during data collection periods
Below are screen grabs captured during each period of data collection, showing the UKs Top Trends on Twitter. Top Trends provide an index of the most popular topics for discussion at any given moment. For each screen grab, Trends directly pertaining to events in Parliament are noted.

Image A1

Screen grab captured: 24th April 2013, 12.30 (at end of PMQs session). Relevant trends: #PMQs; A&E; Stafford; Ed Miliband; Labour.

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Image A2

Screen grab captured: 8th May 2013, 11.47 (five minutes after the end of the Queens Speech). Relevant trends: #QueensSpeech, Black Rod, Parliament.

Image A3

Screen grab captured: 15th May 2013, 12.30 (at end of PMQs session). Relevant trends: #PMQs, A&E, Harriet Harman, Nick Clegg, Labour.

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49