October 9, 2025
Daniel S Lane, Hannah Overbye-Thompson, & Emilija Gagrčin
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication | 2024
This article examines how American news media have framed social media as political technologies over time. To do so, we analyzed 16 years of political news stories focusing on social media, published by American newspapers (N = 8,218) and broadcasters (N = 6,064) (2006–2021). Using automated content analysis, we found that coverage of social media in political news stories: (a) increasingly uses anxious, angry, and moral language, (b) is consistently focused on national politicians (vs. non-elite actors), and (c) increasingly emphasizes normatively negative uses (e.g., misinformation) and their remedies (i.e., regulation).