Politics and journalism: a self-referential bubble in social media: Twitter domains shared by representatives and journalists in Spain

Abstract This paper presents a study on how social media is used in political communication, specifically on how Twitter is used by politicians and journalists in Spain. Through a tool created ad hoc to monitor digital trace data, the authors observe – thanks to machine learning techniques – the hyperlinks that were shared both by the Spanish representatives in the XII National Congress and the main Spanish journalists from June 2018 to May 2019. The results reveal an endogenous relationship between journalists and politicians. The interaction between these two groups is produced in and around the main Spanish media, resulting in an inner flux of information shared by both groups within a self-referential bubble, thus producing an echo chamber effect and missing the enormous possibilities of knowledge expansion provided by social media through the accession to hypertext.

摘要：本研究聚焦社交媒体在政治传播中的应用实践，具体考察西班牙政界人士与新闻从业者对推特（Twitter）的使用情况。研究团队开发专为本次研究定制的数字痕迹数据监测工具，结合机器学习技术，对2018年6月至2019年5月期间，西班牙第十二届全国议会代表与主流西班牙新闻工作者所分享的超链接进行了观测分析。研究结果揭示了新闻从业者与政界人士之间的内生关联：两类群体的互动围绕西班牙主流媒体展开并依托其进行，形成了一个自我指涉的信息循环圈层，双方共享的信息在该封闭圈层内形成内部信息流，进而催生了回声室效应，错失了社交媒体通过接入超文本所提供的知识拓展的巨大可能性。