News Consumption on Social Media

 
From Pew:

Social Media Use: Journalists and Normals

Mark Jurkowitz and Jeffrey Gottfried at Pew:

More than nine-in-ten journalists in the United States (94%) use social media for their jobs, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of reporters, editors and others working in the news industry. But the sites that journalists use most frequently differ from those that the public turns to for news. 

Among journalists, Twitter clearly ranks at the top of the list for work-related tasks. Around seven-in-ten U.S. journalists (69%) say it is the social media site they use most or second most for their job. Twitter is followed by Facebook at 52% and, far lower on the list, by Instagram (19%), LinkedIn (17%) and YouTube (14%). None of the other sites asked about in the survey – Reddit, WhatsApp, TikTok, Discord, Twitch and Snapchat – were named by more than 4% of the journalists surveyed.

A different lineup emerges for the public. Among Americans overall, Facebook is the most widely used social media site for news, with 31% of U.S. adults saying they go there regularly for news. YouTube is the second-most frequently used site, with 22% of the public regularly getting news there. Fewer adults (13%) say they regularly get news on Twitter, despite the platform’s widespread use among journalists. Overall, a little under half of U.S. adults (48%) say they often or sometimes get news from social media sites.

Insurrection, Six Months Later

 Alanna Durkin Richer and Michael Kunzelman at Associated Press:

The first waves of arrests in the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol focused on the easy targets. Dozens in the pro-Trump mob openly bragged about their actions on Jan. 6 on social media and were captured in shocking footage broadcast live by national news outlets.

But six months after the insurrection, the Justice Department is still hunting for scores of rioters, even as the first of more than 500 people already arrested have pleaded guilty. The struggle reflects the massive scale of the investigation and the grueling work still ahead for authorities in the face of an increasing effort by some Republican lawmakers to rewrite what happened that day.

Among those who still haven’t been caught: the person who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the melee, as well as many people accused of attacks on law enforcement officers or violence and threats against journalists. The FBI website seeking information about those involved in the Capitol violence includes more than 900 pictures of roughly 300 people labeled “unidentified.”

Ryan J.  Reilly at Huffington Post:

They call themselves sedition hunters, and they have receipts. They’re members of a loosely affiliated network of motivated individuals and pop-up volunteer organizations with names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers that developed after the Jan. 6 attack to identify the Trump supporters who organized the Capitol riot and brutalized the law enforcement officers protecting the building.

The sedition hunters scour the web for any and all photographs, videos and posts from people at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack across well-known websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter along with lesser-used sites and apps like Rumble, Gab and Telegram. They’ve got spreadsheets, Google Docs, links, bookmarks, unlisted YouTube backups, group chats and screenshots, as Joan puts it, “coming out the rear end.” They can uncover new evidence of conduct that’ll elevate a misdemeanor trespassing case into something much more serious; find the highest-quality image of a suspect that could generate new leads through facial recognition; and compile multimedia databases that turn the Jan. 6 attack into an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing edition of Where’s Waldo.

 

Social Media Use

 

Brooke Auxier and Monica Anderson at Pew:

Despite a string of controversies and the public’s relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social media site – a share that has remained relatively stable over the past five years, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

Beyond the general question of overall social media use, the survey also covers use of individual sites and apps. YouTube and Facebook continue to dominate the online landscape, with 81% and 69%, respectively, reporting ever using these sites. And YouTube and Reddit were the only two platforms measured that saw statistically significant growth since 2019, when the Center last polled on this topic via a phone survey

...

In a pattern consistent with past Center studies on social media use, there are some stark age differences. Some 84% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they ever use any social media sites, which is similar to the share of those ages 30 to 49 who say this (81%). By comparison, a somewhat smaller share of those ages 50 to 64 (73%) say they use social media sites, while fewer than half of those 65 and older (45%) report doing this.

These age differences generally extend to use of specific platforms, with younger Americans being more likely than their older counterparts to use these sites – though the gaps between younger and older Americans vary across platforms.

Majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram or Snapchat and about half say they use TikTok, with those on the younger end of this cohort – ages 18 to 24 – being especially likely to report using Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%) or TikTok (55%).1 These shares stand in stark contrast to those in older age groups. For instance, while 65% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they use Snapchat, just 2% of those 65 and older report using the app – a difference of 63 percentage points.

Additionally, a vast majority of adults under the age of 65 say they use YouTube. Fully 95% of those 18 to 29 say they use the platform, along with 91% of those 30 to 49 and 83% of adults 50 to 64. However, this share drops substantially – to 49% – among those 65 and older.

By comparison, age gaps between the youngest and oldest Americans are narrower for Facebook. Fully 70% of those ages 18 to 29 say they use the platform, and those shares are statistically the same for those ages 30 to 49 (77%) or ages 50 to 64 (73%). Half of those 65 and older say they use the site – making Facebook and YouTube the two most used platforms among this older population.

...

YouTube is used daily by 54% if its users, with 36% saying they visit the site several times a day. By comparison, Twitter is used less frequently, with fewer than half of its users (46%) saying they visit the site daily.

"Payload Content" on YouTube

At Lawfare, Lisa Kaplan reports on TheSoul, a mysterious social media operation that seems to be emulating the "payload content" strategy of the Internet Research Agency.

Most of TheSoul’s videos are clickbait with instructions for do-it-yourself projects, and TheSoul’s channels range in success. Some are less active than others. Of the 35 channels I examined, nine have stopped posting in the past year, and a handful (5-Minute Workouts, Health Is Wealth, Health Digest, Dark Side and Zodiac Maniac) have not posted new content in the past 11 months. You’re Gorgeous, The Story Behind and Stickman have all stopped posting new content within the past six months. However, the most popular channels—Bright Side and 5-Minute Crafts—appear to be active and growing. From August 2019 to December 2019, according to examinations of the data in both periods, Bright Side gained nearly 3.5 million subscribers and 1 billion views, and 5-Minute Crafts gained more than 3 million subscribers and 1.5 billion views.

The vast majority of the company’s content is apolitical—and that is certainly the way the company portrays itself. A spokesperson for TheSoul Publishing commented that “[w]e are very proud of our highly popular videos enjoyed by millions around the world. From do-it-yourself craft to charming animation to riddle and puzzle videos, TheSoul Publishing showcases a portfolio of lighthearted content watched across major social platforms.”

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia. The video opens:

Mr. Banana wants to know what you think about when you hear the word Russia. Do you think of a bear with a bottle of vodka and a balalaika in his paw, or maybe you think about President Putin and the Red Square in Moscow. Let’s have a look at the history of the biggest country in the world.

At one point, the video gives a heavily sanitized version of Josef Stalin’s time in power and, bizarrely, suggests that Alaska was given to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev:

The second leader after Lenin’s death was Josef Stalin. He started to recover the country after the revolution. Josef reformed the country. He took the wealth from rich people and the property from the middle class and united all of these people with poor ones in the collective farm and the collective property. Russian Robin Hood—bang! Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941. It was the beginning of the second World War. Russia was not ready for any wars at the moment, so Hitler hoped to conquer Russia in four months. As naive as Napoleon. The USSR joined the allies. The Soviet Union militaries came to Berlin and beat it. The facism of Hitler was defeated on the second of May 1945 during four years of war, the Soviet Union officially lost twenty-seven million people. Many cities were destroyed. Recovery from the war was very difficult for both people and the country. By 1960, the Soviet Union succeeded, in 1957 the rent of Alaska was over and the country’s leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, gifted Alaska to the USA. That’s when Alaska became the 49th state of the US.

Russian Interference

AT WP, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm write that reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee analyze Russian interference in American politics.

The research -- by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm -- offers new details on how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

...
The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups -- Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans -- got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms -- Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest -- that have gotten relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.

AXIOS HAS THE TEXT OF THE REPORTS. 

Social Media Use

Pew reports:

A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that the social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives.

Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.

As has been the case since the Center began surveying about the use of different social media in 2012, Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.

Alt-Right YouTube

From The Shorenstein Center:

A new paper by Zack Exley, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (spring 2017), organizer and author dives into a little-known part of the alt-right media landscape, revealing its influence and worldview.

Exley writes that political channels on YouTube are currently dominated by the right wing. Although often overlooked by mainstream society, these channels receive millions of views, espousing recycled National Socialist and white nationalist ideologies with a modern twist. The alt-right uses these channels to build influence and spread its ideas among its audience, much as right-wing talk radio has for decades. Exley examines the content of one of these channels, “Black Pigeon Speaks,” uncovering the worldview put forth by the channel’s host, wherein Jewish bankers are ensnaring the world in debt slavery fueled by Muslim migrants, and women, who by their “biological nature,” are destroying civilization.

Combating Fake News

At the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School, David Lazer and colleagues write:

Recent shifts in the media ecosystem raise new concerns about the vulnerability of democratic societies to fake news and the public’s limited ability to contain it. Fake news as a form of misinformation benefits from the fast pace that information travels in today’s media ecosystem, in particular across social media platforms. An abundance of information sources online leads individuals to rely heavily on heuristics and social cues in order to determine the credibility of information and to shape their beliefs, which are in turn extremely difficult to correct or change. The relatively small, but constantly changing, number of sources that produce misinformation on social media offers both a challenge for real-time detection algorithms and a promise for more targeted socio-technical interventions.

There are some possible pathways for reducing fake news, including:

(1) offering feedback to users that particular news may be fake (which seems to depress overall sharing from those individuals); (2) providing ideologically compatible sources that confirm that particular news is fake; (3) detecting information that is being promoted by bots and “cyborg” accounts and tuning algorithms to not respond to those manipulations; and (4) because a few sources may be the origin of most fake news, identifying those sources and reducing promotion (by the platforms) of information from those sources.

As a research community, we identified three courses of action that can be taken in the immediate future: involving more conservatives in the discussion of misinformation in politics, collaborating more closely with journalists in order to make the truth “louder,” and developing multidisciplinary community-wide shared resources for conducting academic research on the presence and dissemination of misinformation on social media platforms.

Moving forward, we must expand the study of social and cognitive interventions that minimize the effects of misinformation on individuals and communities, as well as of how socio-technical systems such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter currently facilitate the spread of misinformation and what internal policies might reduce those effects. More broadly, we must investigate what the necessary ingredients are for information systems that encourage a culture of truth.

News and Social Media

Pew reports:

A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.1
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It is also useful to see how, when combined with the sites’ total reach, the proportion of users who gets news on each site translates to U.S. adults overall. Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 48% of U.S. adults. But only about a fifth of its users get news there, which amounts to 10% of the adult population. That puts it on par with Twitter, which has a smaller user base (16% of U.S. adults) but a larger portion getting news there.

Hollywood, Education Reform, and a State Election

In our textbook, we mention the political role of the entertainment media, the politics of education reform, and the significance of state elections.  This item, from The San Francisco Chronicle, touches on all three:

Hollywood isn’t shy about putting its star status and cash behind big-deal political candidates.

But candidates running for the wonky state superintendent of public instruction job doesn’t usually draw A-list interest.

Until now.

Marshall Tuck, who is running against incumbent Tom Torlakson, has released a video featuring Joel McHale (“Community”); Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation”); Dax Shepard (“Parenthood”); and Kristen Bell (“House of Lies”

The ad features Tuck at a kitchen table with McHale, Shepard and Bell, who are grilling him about public education in California. They ultimately throw their support behind Tuck, with Scott joining them between bites of pizza.

John Hrabe writes at CalNewsroom.com:

Election Day is still a month away, but Marshall Tuck’s campaign for State Superintendent of Public Instruction has already delivered the best ad of the 2014 cycle.

With the perfect blend of facts and humor, “Tuck Gets New Consultants” explains why the education reformer and charter school executive is qualified to oversee California’s public school system. In the ad, actors Joel McHale, Dax Shepard, Kristen Bell and Adam Scott grill Tuck about his background and California’s under-performing schools, which rank 45th in math and reading.

There’s so much to love about this ad: It’s funny. It uses celebrities in a constructive way. It educates the public about California’s failing education system. It informs voters about Tuck’s background. It corrects the misconception that he’s the private school candidate. And it includes a dig on the San Francisco Chronicle.

“You’ve been endorsed by The San Francisco Chronicle. Who gives a (BLEEP)?” Shepard says.

Bootleg Video of the Supreme Court

AP reports:

A protest group has posted what appears to be the first video of the Supreme Court taken inside the courtroom with the court in session.

The Supreme Court forbids cameras and all other electronic devices, but members of the protest group 99Rise appear to have shot video on two separate occasions since October.

The more recent footage, posted on YouTube, captures a courtroom protest on Wednesday by a man the court identified as Noah Newkirk of Los Angeles. A 99Rise news release posted online says group co-founder Kai Newkirk was the person who called on the court to overturn its 2010 Citizens United decision. Police hustled him out of the courtroom and charged him with disturbing the proceedings.

The protest was the first to disrupt an argument session in more than seven years, since the court heard an abortion dispute in late 2006.

 

Unlobbyists

Many posts have discussed non-lobbying lobbying, or unlobbying. Thomas Edsall writes at The New York Times:

If you look at the numbers, it may seem that lobbying is in decline, but it isn’t; it’s just taking different forms. What was once straightforward lobbying has become, in effect, a full service PR-advertising-social media operation, very little of which is covered by federal regulation.

In a field buffeted by the economic meltdown of 2008, the current legislative standstill on Capitol Hill, the emergence of high-tech competitors and the passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (which subjects registered lobbyists to a stringent regulatory regime including the threat of criminal sanctions and prison time), this shift in the influence industry poses a broader question. Are the days of the glad-handing lobbyist, carrying an envelope of PAC checks and the proposed wording of a client’s legislative amendment, numbered?

Carter Eskew, a founding partner of the Glover Park Group, which lobbies and provides a host of other services to clients, raised this question in a conversation with me.

Looking to future sources of new revenue, Eskew has concluded that “ ‘relationship lobbying’ is dead, or at least not where the growth will be.” The traditional lobbyist, he argues, is no longer the éminence grise of days past but instead has been reduced to serving as a conduit for campaign contributions from corporate and trade association PACs to candidates.

These comments overstate the case.  On many low-profile or technical issues, traditional lobbying is essential.  Lobbyists spend a great deal of time dealing with staffers or executive-branch officials about the fine print of obscure laws or rules. These efforts usually do not involve PR campaigns but instead depend on the knowledge and expertise of the lobbyists.

Still, the article makes good points about the new world of public affairs, which now encompasses social media.

Ed Rogers, who worked on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is currently a registered lobbyist and chairman of the BGR Group (formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers). BGR, in addition to straightforward lobbying, has a web-based practice and a public relations arm. Rogers noted in an interview that the Internet is changing the nature of lobbying. Now “it’s essential to manage the Google hole, what’s Google got about you, you have to inject content, enhance the good and dilute the bad.” The same assertive approach, Rogers argues, applies to YouTube videos and Wikipedia entries.

Political Videos Online

Political videos are big this year, as Pew reports:

55% of registered voters have watched political videos online this election season. We asked about six different types of political videos and found that, among registered voters who use the internet:

• 48% watch video news reports about the election or politics
• 40% watch previously recorded videos of candidate speeches, press conferences, or debates
• 39% watch informational videos online that explain a political issue
• 37% watch humorous or parody videos dealing with political issues
• 36% watch political advertisements online
• 28% watch live videos of candidate speeches, press conferences, or debates

We also find that political videos are highly social. Some 52% of registered voters say that other people have recommended political videos for them to watch this election season, with social networking sites playing a prominent role in this process. In addition, 19% of registered voters have recommended online political videos for other people to watch.

Bridget Mary McCormack

CNN reports on how a Michigan judicial candidate got a big-time boost from Hollywood and social media (and gave a lesson on election procedure):

Bridget Mary McCormack, whose sister Mary McCormack played deputy national security adviser Kate Harper on NBC's television series "The West Wing," is on the ballot this fall in Michigan as a nonpartisan candidate for the state's Supreme Court.

Her campaign "The Bridget Mary McCormack for Justice Campaign" has paid for a YouTube video that has the show's cast reprising their roles as West Wing problem solvers focusing on the thorny issue of the nonpartisan section of the ballot, and one particular cast member's sister who happens to be on it.

Hoping to boost November turnout for candidate McCormack and to drive general nonpartisan ballot voting awareness, the "West Wing" star and her former cast mates shot two versions of the four minute video which taps into several quintessential moments from the hit show. One version focuses strictly on promoting nonpartisan ballot awareness and the other also advocates for McCormack.

According to the Detroit Free Press, the campaign does not plan to air the video as a paid advertisement.

Free Speech and the Anti-Muslim Video

At The Los Angeles Times, Sarah Chayes argues that the First Amendment does not protect the YouTube video that was the pretext for violence in the Mideast.  She writes:

While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. "Based on my understanding of the events," 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, "I think this meets the imminence standard."

Lewis is neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar.  He is a former reporter whom Noam Chomsky described as at “the far left of the spectrum.”

Eugene Volokh, who actually is a First Amendment scholar, has a different view:

In recent days, I’ve heard various people calling for punishing the maker of Innocence of Muslims, and more broadly for suppressing such speech. During the Terry Jones planned Koran-burning controversy, I heard similar calls. Such expression leads to the deaths of people, including Americans. It worsens our relations with important foreign countries. It’s intended to stir up trouble. And it’s hardly high art, or thoughtful political arguments. It’s not like it’s Satanic Verses, or even South Park or Life of Brian. Why not shut it down, and punish those who engage in it (of course, while keeping Satanic Verses and the like protected)?

I think there are many reasons to resist such calls, but in this post I want to focus on one: I think such suppression would likely lead to more riots and more deaths, not less. Here’s why.

Behavior that gets rewarded, gets repeated. (Relatedly, “once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.”) Say that the murders in Libya lead us to pass a law banning some kinds of speech that Muslims find offensive or blasphemous, or reinterpreting our First Amendment rules to make it possible to punish such speech under some existing law.

What then will extremist Muslims see? They killed several Americans (maybe itself a plus from their view). In exchange, they’ve gotten America to submit to their will. And on top of that, they’ve gotten back at blasphemers, and deter future blasphemy. A triple victory.

Would this (a) satisfy them that now America is trying to prevent blasphemy, so there’s no reason to kill over the next offensive incident, or (b) make them want more such victories? My money would be on (b).

Social Media and the Mideast Crisis

Social media have played a central part in the unfolding crisis in the Mideast.  Politico reports:

The Internet tools of the Arab Spring have become the weapons of a new Arabian nightmare playing out at American diplomatic missions across North Africa and the Middle East.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that spread an obscure movie trailer depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in offensive ways are facing a clamp-down from governments and even Internet companies in some cases.

Google-owned YouTube has blocked access to the video from inside Libya and Egypt. President Hamid Karzai has set up a firewall to prevent Afghans from viewing YouTube videos at all. And the U.S. Embassy in Cairo deleted its own tweets about the video after they became part of the political debate in the American presidential election.

The Atlantic reports:

American diplomat Larry Schwartz has gotten himself into some trouble this week. A senior public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Schwartz on Tuesday wrote a much-discussed memo stating that the embassy "condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims," as well as several defensive tweets, some of which he later deleted. For example: "This morning's condemnation (issued before protests began) still stands. As does condemnation of unjustified breach of the Embassy." Romney condemned the "apology," as he described it, and the White House quickly disavowed the memo.

State Department officials back in Washington, it turns out, had reviewed the memo and explicitly told Schwartz not to publish it, which he did anyway. "Frankly, people here did not understand it," a State Department official told Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin. "The statement was just tone deaf. It didn't provide adequate balance. We thought the references to the 9/11 attacks were inappropriate, and we strongly advised against the kind of language that talked about 'continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.'"

Tuesday's controversial tweets from the @USEmbassyCairo account, which Schwartz reportedly runs, were unusually provocative and political but otherwise generally consistent with the feed's noticeably conversational tone. American embassies across the globe have taken to Twitter over the last year or two, an impressive soft power outreach to citizens of foreign countries, but the Cairo feed has stood out. Other feeds, even when they tweet frequently, tend to take the staid tone of official diplomacy, tweeting press releases, quotes from U.S. officials, and relevant headlines. 

The Washington Post reports:

The White House asked YouTube on Tuesday to review an anti-Muslim film posted to the site that has been blamed for igniting the violent protests this week in the Middle East.

Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House has “reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.”

However, the video remained on the site as of Friday afternoon, and it is posted many other places on the Internet.

Messages to YouTube, and Google, which owns the site, were not immediately returned Friday. On Wednesday, a YouTube spokesperson said the video “is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.”

The Digital Campaign

Previous posts have examined the role of technology in the presidential race. The Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism reports:

On the eve of the conventions, Barack Obama holds a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters. The Obama campaign is posting almost four times as much content and is active on nearly twice as many platforms, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report, which analyzed the content and volume of candidate communications on their websites and social media channels from June 4-17, 2012, finds that the digital gap between the campaigns was the greatest on Twitter. The Romney campaign averaged 1 tweet per day while the Obama campaign averaged 29 tweets, 17 per day on @BarackObama (the Twitter account associated with his presidency) and 12 on @Obama2012 (the account associated with his campaign). Obama also had about twice as many blog posts on his campaign website than did Romney and more than twice as many YouTube videos.

The study also found that while both campaigns' digital content primarily focused on their own candidate, roughly a third of the posts from the Romney campaign were about Obama-largely attacking him for a policy stance or action. About half as many of the Obama campaign's posts, 14%, focused on his challenger during the period studied.

"As the conventions drew closer, Romney's campaign took steps to close the technology gap, and may well take more with the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket," said PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell. "But there is a long way to go before the Romney team matches the level of activity of the Obama campaign."

The report notes a gap:

Neither campaign made much use of the social aspect of social media. Rarely did either candidate reply to, comment on, or "retweet" something from a citizen-or anyone else outside the campaign. On Twitter, 3% of the 404 Obama campaign tweets studied during the June period were retweets of citizen posts. Romney's campaign produced just a single retweet during these two weeks-repeating something from his son Josh.

News and YouTube

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism examined 15 months' worth of  YouTube and analyzed its role in the world of news:

The data reveal that a complex, symbiotic relationship has developed between citizens and news organizations on YouTube, a relationship that comes close to the continuous journalistic "dialogue" many observers predicted would become the new journalism online. Citizens are creating their own videos about news and posting them. They are also actively sharing news videos produced by journalism professionals. And news organizations are taking advantage of citizen content and incorporating it into their journalism. Consumers, in turn, seem to be embracing the interplay in what they watch and share, creating a new kind of television news.

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Among the key findings of this study:

• The most popular news videos tended to depict natural disasters or political upheaval-usually featuring intense visuals. With a majority of YouTube traffic (70%) outside the U.S., the three most popular storylines worldwide over the 15-month period were non-U.S. events. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was No. 1 (and accounted for 5% of all the 260 videos), followed by elections in Russia (5%) and unrest in the Middle East (4%).
• News events are inherently more ephemeral than other kinds of information, but at any given moment news can outpace even the biggest entertainment videos. In 2011, news events were the most searched term on YouTube four months out of 12, according to YouTube's internal data: the Japanese Earthquake, the killing of Osama bin Laden, a fatal motorcycle accident, and news of a homeless man who spoke with what those producing the video called a "god-given gift of voice." Yet over time certain entertainment videos can have a cumulative appeal that will give them higher viewership.
• Citizens play a substantial role in supplying and producing footage. More than a third of the most watched videos (39%) were clearly identified as coming from citizens. Another 51% bore the logo of a news organization, though some of that footage, too, appeared to have been originally shot by users rather than journalists. (5% came from corporate and political groups, and the origin of another 5% was not identified.)

Unusual Congressional Video

The Politwoops site presents tweets that politicians have posted and then deleted.  Recently, it included a tweet touting a video by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA):

 

The Washington Post adds:

It fell to Rep. Loretta Sanchez to combine, at last, your two favorite things of the summer: Capitol Hill interns and “Call Me Maybe” video parodies. In what is believed to be the first congressional take on the Carly Rae Jepsen earworm, the California Democrat grooves to the tune from behind her desk — while watching the YouTube viral video of the Harvard baseball team doing the same, and mimicking their herky-jerky dance moves. Then a deadpan chorus line of office interns pop up to join her. Hey, how come only 60 seconds of music? “We were just trying to take a minimum of her time,” spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told us. Oh, and btw — why? After a rough couple days of partisan mudslinging, she said, it “seemed like a great way to inject some lightheartedness into the week.” Plus, “Call Me Maybe”! Who can resist? (See the video, below. . . )