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Protest friends: shared cognition, networks and affordances of Facebook political groups

par Veltri, Giuseppe A.;Gagliolo, Matteo
Référence European Conference on Social Networks INSNA (1: July 2014: Barcelona, Spain)
Publication Non publié, 2014-07-04

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Studying the strategies adopted by political groups to create sharedcognition and common references is a challenging task, which has beenconsiderably eased by the availability of online data. Analyzing fourlarge Italian political groups on Facebook, we provide an example ofhow Facebook data can be employed to study the use of this platformfor political aims, and identify relevant similarities and differencesacross groups. Our research draws on theory in social psychology,sociology, and organization behavior: In particular, two minoritypolitical groups are contrasted with two majority ones, testinghypotheses about socially shared cognition patterns in minority andmajority groups, their interactions network structure and itsevolution. We also consider the platform constraints, the"affordances" of Facebook, on groups' behavior and networkstructure. Methodologically, we represent user activity as a multiplextwo-mode network, where users and posts correspond to the two modes,and link types represent user actions (like, comment, share). We studythe degree distributions of these three networks, identifying heavytails and correlations among the layers, to better characterizenetwork structure, and user activity. Additionally, we measure theimpact of re-shares of shares. The results highlight the differentbehavior of users of the minority pages, who make a more prominent useof the liking and sharing actions, in order to increase their internalsocially shared knowledge base and external visibility. At the sametime, minority groups utilize Facebook in a distinctive manner tore-define reality, using more visual rather textual representations,and sharing more content from other Facebook pages, effectively actingas repeaters of other alternative sources.