Research Questions and Hypotheses Regarding the Influence of Social Media on News Article Opinions

Questions and Hypotheses

Q1: How does individual social identity influence group opinion on current news events?

H1: Social identity, or self-defined membership within a certain group, create a consolidated positional opinion. It is hypothesized that individuals with strong social identities within a group will acquire certain group-defined characteristics including common opinion on current events.

Q2: In what ways do individuals develop and maintain persuasive power and influence group sentiment about news stories?

H1: It is hypothesized that an individual develops influence capital based on the sharing of information, knowledge, involvement, and expertise regarding the situation being reported upon.

H2: In addition to personal experience, it is hypothesized that individual predisposition to influence and charisma as well as demographic similarities to the group being influenced will create stronger group sentiment.

Q3: What level of influence do different types of commentary hold over readers of news stories?

H1: It is hypothesized that, while anonymous or stranger commentary does not affect consumer opinion, commentary by known parties holds persuasive power on news opinion.

H2: Given that stranger, the commentary does not greatly impact reader opinion on news articles, it is hypothesized that commentary from unknown companies holds greater persuasive power.

Q4: How do social situations including social media settings affect how people voice an opinion?

H1: It is hypothesized that people will limit the expression of different or controversial opinions in social media arenas due to the desire to fit in and to create an agreeable social presentation. Therefore, people whose views differ from the majority commentary on a news article such as immigration will tone down or change their opinion to more closely match the norm.

Q5: How does news websites’ use of social media influence user views and opinions?

H1: It is hypothesized that using aggregates to group articles by topic introduces readers to fuller and more varied opinions on news events including a wider range of sentiment.

H2: It is hypothesized news social media presence can track reader activity and understand general opinion more thoroughly.

Q6: How does an individual desire to conform to external expectations affect expressed an opinion on news stories and events?

H1: It is hypothesized that individuals will be more likely to conform personal opinion to those of others if that individual is part of a social group along with those being conformed to.

H2: It is hypothesized that individual desire to conform to group opinion on news events will be stronger if the individual is receiving externalized pressure in addition to internalized pressure.

Q7: In what ways does group opinion on news events affect the individual perception of reality?

H1: It is hypothesized that individuals with uncertain views may accept others’ beliefs as evidenced fact even when there is not a social motivation to agree with the opinion.

H2: When an individual has uncertain beliefs about a news issue, it is hypothesized that he or she will be more influenced by social media commentary from a known party than a stranger.

Q8: In what ways can news corporations use commentary thread to understand reader interest?

H1: By following comment trains, it is hypothesized that news corporations can understand how readers and listeners connect certain issues to other relevant issues.

H2: It is hypothesized that corporations can track user preferences through votes on comments.

Q9: What weight do original content, reader reply with quotes, and reader reply with unquoted commentary bear upon reader opinion of news topics?

H1: It is hypothesized that quotation and reply affect reader opinion more than the original content, with quoted replies bearing less weight than original commentary.

References

Amer-Yahia, S., Anjum, S., Ghenai, A., Siddique, A., Abbar, S., Madden, S., Marcus, A., & El-Haddad, M. (2012). MAQSA: A system for social analytics on news. SIGMOD '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 653-656.

Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629-636.

Kulkarni, C., & Chi, E. (2013). All the news that's fit to read: A study of social annotations for news reading. ACM Digital Archives.

Langner, S., Hennigs, N., & Weidmann, K. (2013). Social persuasion: targeting social identities through social influencers. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 30(1), 31-49.

Li, Q., Wang, J., Chen, Y., Lin, Z. (2010). User comments for news recommendations in forum-based social media. Journal of Information Sciences, 1(80), 4929-4939.