8 Social media and electoral forecasts
but this power is no longer universal since independent blog platforms redistribute
it between mainstream media and citizen media: “traditional media agenda setting
is now just one force among many competing influences” (Meraz 2009: 701) and
social media seem to enhance citizens’ influence in setting the agenda of media.
Analogously, Wallsten (2007: 567) found evidence of a “complex, bidirectional
relationship between mainstream media coverage and blog discussion rather than
a unidirectional media or blog agenda- setting effect” while YouTube too was
found to follow and lead mainstream media salience (Sayre et al. 2010). Along
the same vein, Neuman et al. (2014) analyzed Granger causality in a variety of
issue areas but found mutual and reciprocal causality between traditional media
and social media. Finally, Jungherr (2014) found that Twitter messages follow the
same logic of traditional news media in some cases, even though not everything
that receives media attention reaches a similar level of attention online.
A wide number of studies, however, have retained that mainstream media still
affect the salience of issues discussed online. Traditional media seem to set the
agenda of Internet- fueled communication tools, such as bulletin boards and chat
rooms (Roberts et al. 2002), weblogs (Lee 2007) and online information seek-
ing (Scharkow and Vogelgesang 2011; Weeks and Southwell 2010). Scharkow
and Vogelgesang (2011) resorted to Google Insights for Search to measure the
public agenda. They highlighted the potential of such data, suggesting that can
even be used in “forecasting tomorrow’s news from today’s recipients’ informa-
tion seeking” (Scharkow and Vogelgesang 2011: 111). Along this vein, another
work has explored the relationship between mainstream media and online search
activity, showing that media coverage influences Google Trends’ public salience
of a particular topic (Weeks and Southwell 2010). Focusing on Twitter, Vargo
(2011) analyzed the reciprocal influence between new and old media, showing
that traditional media affect public conversations on a large scale while Twitter
has only a limited effect. Analogously, Vargo et al. (2015) analyzed the mortgage
and housing crisis agendas and the BP oil spill in the United States, showing that
traditional media are still in control of the agenda, even though agenda- setting
effects on Twitter are not equal in regards to issues and events.
In this regard, Ceron et al. (2016) recently analyzed the Italian political debate
on Twitter and newspapers, focusing on two heated political debates that took
place between 2012 and 2014 on issues that were particularly salient for voters,
media and the political elites: the reform of public funding of parties, enacted
between April and July 2012 after the eruption of several corruption scandals, and
the debate over the policy of austerity, which played an important role in view
of the 2014 European elections. Their results confirmed that online news media
keep their first- level agenda- setting power. The attention devoted to an issue by
online media outlets influences the SNS salience of that issue and drives Twitter
users to discuss it.
However, there is a difference between being able to affect what the public
thinks about ( first- level agenda- setting) and being able to influence how the
public thinks about that issue (second- level agenda- setting). In other words, the
(possible) enhanced attention built by online media outlets does not imply that they