{"id":38302,"date":"2019-11-30T09:00:27","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T17:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=38302"},"modified":"2019-11-29T18:38:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T02:38:33","slug":"everyday-erinyes-194","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/30\/everyday-erinyes-194\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #194"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/span><\/strong>, Megaera<\/strong><\/span>, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

About the last thing I am is a social media expert – well, in fact, it’s not even on the list<\/a>. I am aware that a “tag” is not the same thing as a “hashtag,” and that’s about as far as my knowledge goes. But since we got into the subject of tags this week, I thought this information might be interesting – even if you never use, or at least never create, either one.
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Political hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter make people less likely to believe the news<\/h1>\n
News outlets sometimes use hashtags to promote their stories.
\n13_Phunkod\/Shutterstock.com<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Eugenia Ha Rim Rho<\/a>, University of California, Irvine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re a conservative or a liberal, you have most likely come across a political hashtag in an article, a tweet or a personal story shared on Facebook.<\/p>\n

A hashtag is a functional tag widely used in search engines and social networking services that allow people to search for content that falls under the word or phrase, followed by the # sign.<\/p>\n

First popularized by Twitter in 2009, the use of hashtags has become widespread. Nearly anything political with the intent of attracting a wide audience is now branded with a catchy hashtag. Take for example, election campaigns (#MAGA), social movements (#FreeHongKong<\/a>) or calls for supporting or opposing laws (#LoveWins<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Along with activists and politicians, news companies are also using political hashtags to increase readership and to contextualize reporting in short, digestible social media posts. According to Columbia Journalism Review<\/a>, such practice is a \u201cgood way to introduce a story or perspective into the mainstream news cycle\u201d and \u201ca way to figure out what the public wants to discuss and learn more about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is this really true?<\/p>\n

Our experiment<\/h2>\n

To find out, we conducted a controlled online experiment<\/a> with 1,979 people.<\/p>\n

We tested whether people responded differently to the presence or absence of political hashtags \u2013 particularly the most widely used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter \u2013 in news articles published on Facebook by major news outlets, such as The New York Times<\/a> and NPR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We randomly showed each person a news post that either contained or excluded the political hashtag. We then asked them to comment on the article and answer a few questions about it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The original news post was identical to the one the right, except for the bolded #MeToo followed by the text description. For the control condition (left), we excluded the hashtag in the post text, as well as the phrase \u2018#MeToo Prompts\u2019 in the headline.<\/span>
\nEugenia Ha Rim Rho<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We discovered that political hashtags are not a good way for news outlets to engage readers.<\/p>\n

In fact, when the story included a hashtag, people perceived the news topic to be less important and were less motivated to know more about related issues.<\/p>\n

Some readers were also inclined to view news stories with hashtags as more politically biased. This was especially true for more conservative readers, who were more likely to say a news post was extremely partisan when it included a hashtag.<\/p>\n

Similarly, hashtags also negatively affected liberal readers. However, readers who identified themselves as \u201cextremely liberal\u201d did not perceive social media news content about gender and racial issues as partisan, regardless of hashtag presence.<\/p>\n

Political moderates<\/h2>\n

What really interested me was the reaction from people in the middle. People who identified as politically moderate perceived news posts to be significantly more partisan when the posts included hashtags.<\/p>\n

In fact, in their comments, politically moderate respondents who saw news posts with hashtags were more suspicious about the credibility of the news and focused more on the politics of the hashtag.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The news post on the right is identical to the original news post published on Facebook, except for the bolded #MeToo hashtag in the post text, which was not included in the original version.<\/span>
\nEugenia Ha Rim Rho<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n