Understanding the technological democratisation of public opinion cues

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How citizens perceive wider public opinion can influence their own democratic decisions, including: vote intention and turnout, campaign donations and propensity to voice political opinions. Traditionally, journalists have played a privileged role in moulding perceptions of public opinion through presenting cues such as polls and 'man-on-the-street' type interviews. The latter, also known as 'vox pops', have been found to exert powerful influence over audiences' sense of public consensus.However, technology has led to a dramatic proliferation of who can amplify the voice of the common man: from ordinary social media users, to nefarious bots and trolls, as well as algorithms. This, in turn, has had a substantial impact on journalists' approaches too. What then, are the implications of this proliferation for the representation of ordinary people's views and how might democratic outcomes be influenced by such developments? My work aims to address this question by investigating the influence of social media posts on perceptions of public opinion for ordinary users, journalists and readers of online news. To do so, it will incorporate theories and approaches from multiple disciplines - including political science, psychology and digital communications - and utilise a mixed-method approach of: content analysis, in-depth interviews and experiments.More specifically, the project comprises three parts: 1) Analysing how social media platforms enable ordinary users to express their opinions and how these acts of self-expression can in turn represent cues to public opinion for other audiences. 2) Understanding the type of social media posts that journalists are including within news articles. How these decisions might be influenced by the interplay of partisanship, implicit biases (such as motivated reasoning) and the social media environments (or the use of algorithm-powered social media surveillance software). 3) The impact of vox pop tweets for ordinary citizens, both in terms of the experiences of posters who are included in articles (and potentially exposed to abuse) and political perceptions and behaviour of news consumers. In sum, this project aims to enrich our understanding of how different uses of social media for political expression, potentially including conscious disinformation attempts, may influence perceptions of public opinion and, in turn, mass political behaviour. Additionally, the project will further our knowledge of the interplay between technological advances and journalism, allowing us to develop methods of combating online manipulation of public opinion and its potential offline democratic outcomes.