Understanding the technological democratisation of public opinion cues

公民如何看待更广泛的公众舆论可以影响他们自己的民主决定，包括：投票意愿和投票率、竞选捐款和表达政治观点的倾向。传统上，记者通过提供诸如民意调查和“街头采访”之类的线索，在塑造对公众舆论的看法方面发挥了特殊作用。后者，也被称为“vox pop”，被发现对受众的公众共识感施加了强大的影响。然而，科技已经导致能够放大普通人声音的人急剧增加：从普通的社交媒体用户，到邪恶的机器人和喷子，以及算法。这反过来也对记者的报道方式产生了重大影响。那么，这种扩散对普通民众观点的代表意味着什么？这种发展如何影响民主结果？我的工作旨在通过调查社交媒体帖子对普通用户、记者和在线新闻读者对公众舆论的看法的影响来解决这个问题。为此，它将整合来自多个学科的理论和方法——包括政治学、心理学和数字通信——并利用内容分析、深度访谈和实验的混合方法。更具体地说，该项目包括三个部分：1)分析社交媒体平台如何使普通用户表达自己的意见，以及这些自我表达行为如何反过来为其他受众提供公众意见的线索。2)了解记者在新闻文章中包含的社交媒体帖子的类型。这些决定如何受到党派关系、隐性偏见（如动机推理）和社交媒体环境（或使用算法驱动的社交媒体监控软件）的相互影响。3) vox pop推文对普通公民的影响，包括文章中的发帖者的经历（可能会受到虐待）和新闻消费者的政治观念和行为。总而言之，本项目旨在丰富我们对社交媒体用于政治表达的不同用途（可能包括有意识的虚假信息企图）如何影响公众舆论的看法，进而影响大众政治行为的理解。此外，该项目将进一步加深我们对技术进步与新闻之间相互作用的了解，使我们能够制定方法，打击在线操纵公众舆论及其潜在的线下民主结果。

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.