Mass Communication Commons^™

Advancing Democracy One Tweet At A Time, Landon T. Hester

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis takes a broad look how citizens use social media to foster political discussion, enhance political knowledge and engage in political participation in the United States. In this study, democracy is broken down into three empirically measurable components: political discussion, knowledge and participation. To begin, I provide an in-­‐depth review of past research examining the impact social media has on each element of democracy. In addition, I analyze data collected from a novel social media panel of 3,811 Twitter users by researchers from Louisiana State University (Davis et. al, 2017). From this, I measure the impact that Facebook and …

Like, Comment, And Share: Distortion Of Information On Facebook, Sungwoo Hong

Global Honors Theses

Social media users all around the globe use Facebook to stay connected with each other, and it is a dominant source of news: “over 63% of users acquire their news from social media” (Schmidt, 2017, p.3035). The connectivity of social media has created unintended consequences that promote or influence creation and dissemination of misinformation. By literature review and using real world example, this research identifies sources and provocation of inaccurate news, and explores how user interaction within social media promotes dissemination of distorted information.

Wardle (2017) from FirstDraftNews, suggests that there are seven distinct types of content and eight different …