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Workshop

Why do people share content? Ideas for future work on narratives on the data from the field experiments.

  • Lisa Oswald (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
  • Philipp Lorenz-Spreen (MPIB)
E1 05 (Leibniz-Saal)

Abstract

Twitter data (Philipp Lorenz-Spreen): What motivates people to share and create content online? And do those motives change for different narratives? In real time, we linked each of N=2,762 individual posts (retweets and newly created content) with the self-reported motives from a sample of N=137 highly active US Twitter users over the course of one week. We also captured their total activity of N=48,419 posts over 10 weeks (March-May 2022). This labeled data provides a unique opportunity to link the motives of the users with the narratives contained in the content itself. Potentially, certain groups of narratives or overarching themes have common motives for the people who contribute to and disseminate them.

Reddit data (Lisa Oswald): Counterfactuals are difficult to find when analysing narratives in social media. In the course of an online field experiment on Reddit, we elicited discussions on 20 different political issues and let discussions unfold in parallel across 6 closed, private online communities. In this session, we provide a brief overview over the existing dataset and would like to propose it as basis for future analyses with a focus on narratives.

Katharina Matschke

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Contact via Mail

Jürgen Jost

Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften

Eckehard Olbrich

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Marjan Horvat

IRRIS Institute

Tom Willaert

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Armin Pournaki

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences