695745

earch-article2017
NMS0010.1177/1461444817695745new media & societyStoycheff et al.

Review article

new media & society

What have we learned

2017, Vol. 19(6) 968­–980
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444817695745
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817695745
studying Facebook? A journals.sagepub.com/home/nms

decade in review

Elizabeth Stoycheff, Juan Liu,

Kunto A. Wibowo and Dominic P. Nanni
Wayne State University, USA

Abstract
A recent review published by Rains and Brunner documented an overwhelming
preponderance of the Facebook brand in scholarship about social networking sites (SNS).
This follow-up analysis shows that Facebook is still over-privileged when examining the
broader umbrella of social media brands; the social networking hegemon constitutes
over half of all scholarship across an array of social media, including SNS, media sharing
sites, (micro)blogging platforms, virtual communities, and others. This study builds upon
Rains and Brunner’s critiques about the over-reliance on the Facebook brand and calls
for more scholarship that examines social media as part of larger media repertoires, is
more inclusive of indigenous social media brands and their users, and provides greater
diversity in terms of academic context. In doing, it serves as the most comprehensive
review of social media scholarship to date. Implications for future research are discussed.

Keywords
Social media, social networking sites, Facebook, brands, content analysis

In a recent review published in New Media & Society, Rains and Brunner (2015) con-
ducted a comprehensive content analysis to examine the state of scholarship on social
networking sites (SNS) to date and concluded that Facebook is overwhelmingly
employed as researchers’ brand of choice. They rightfully identify the many downfalls of

Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
Email: elizabeth.stoycheff@wayne.edu
Stoycheff et al. 969

relying so heavily on a single brand, including limited generalizability, privileging par-

ticular user groups, undue influence of corporate policies, feature-focus orientation, and
the threat of brand extinction. While the Facebook brand has become nearly synonymous
with SNS, it also appears to be increasingly endemic of all social media—which encom-
passes a vast umbrella of interactive platforms that includes everything from SNS to
video and photo sharing to virtual worlds (Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013).
This review undertook a replication of Rains and Brunner’s analysis by employing a
broader lens, that of social media scholarship in general, to investigate just how deep
academic reliance on Facebook runs. Even with this extended scope, over half of all
social media studies conducted in the past decade relied on Facebook (52%). We extend
these authors’ critiques of privileging the Facebook brand and further discuss how it has
shaped the academic contexts, geographic diversity, and social science’s collective
understanding of social media uses and effects over the past 10 years. In doing, we
uniquely identify academic subfields, geographic regions, and media repertoires that are
worthy of increased scholarly attention through the most comprehensive review of social
media scholarship to date.

Social media defined

The past decade has witnessed widespread diffusion of online tools that facilitate greater
social presence and a richer mediated experience. These new media platforms have
helped bridge the interpersonal-mass media divide, attracting scholars who examine uses
and effects across varying levels of analysis. To date, there have been two comprehen-
sive reviews of social science scholarship on Facebook and SNS more generally (Rains
and Brunner, 2015; Wilson et al., 2012), in which SNS are best understood as online
tools that enable users to create a profile, make one’s connections’ known, interact with
streams of content, and emphasize interpersonal communication as the primary activity
(Ellison and boyd, 2013; Rains and Brunner, 2015). But SNS are only one sub-genre of
a larger umbrella of social media platforms worthy of examination (Beer, 2008). Many
other classifications, or sub-genres, of social media have been identified, including, but
not limited to blogs (e.g., LiveJournal), microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Weibo), discussion
forums (e.g., Yahoo message boards, CafeMom), content-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube,
Instagram), bookmarking sites (e.g., Pinterest, Delicious), virtual communities (e.g.,
Second Life), and online review sites (e.g., Yelp) (Hogan and Quan-Haase, 2010; Kaplan
and Haenlein, 2010). Collectively, these sub-genres are known as social media (for a
review of social media typologies, see Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Osatuyi, 2013; Treem
and Leonardi, 2012; Wilson et al., 2011).
For the purposes of this review, we adapted Bechmann and Lomborg’s (2013) three-
fold definition of social media. First, social media are deinstitutionalized online platforms,
meaning their content is not created and disseminated by media companies and organiza-
tions, but instead rely on the internet’s decentralized sharing structures. Second, social
media depend primarily on user-generated content, such that ordinary individuals (i.e., not
media professionals) are responsible for media creation and dissemination, and third,
social media are dynamic, facilitating a two-way interaction with an audience, beyond any
specified recipient. This definition is intentionally broad to provide a comprehensive
970 new media & society 19(6)

examination of various social media sub-genres (e.g., SNS, content-sharing, (micro)

blogs, wikis, virtual communities, discussion forums), and closely reflects others’ recent
conceptualizations (Carr and Hayes, 2015; Fang et al., 2014; Howard and Parks, 2012;
Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Treem and Leonardi, 2012). It
excludes one-to-one computer-mediated communication (e.g., email, instant messaging),
content produced by media institutions (e.g., online news sites), simulated or fictional
social media sites established only for research purposes, and offline social interactions.
Like SNS, social media are—in large part—commercial enterprises that use brands—
or unique characteristic names (like Facebook, YouTube, and Google+) to differentiate
themselves from competitors in the marketplace (Laroche et al., 2012; McDowell, 2004;
also see Rains and Brunner, 2015 for an explication of social network brands). Branding
is increasingly important to social media as platforms continue to diversify to attract dif-
ferent user groups and advertisers. Recent research has indicated that the trust individu-
als bestow to specific social media over time can be transferred to content presented on
the site (Pentina et al., 2013), and the use of social media brands in empirical scholarship
increases external validity and provides both study participants and study readers with a
clear understanding of which social media are included in the investigation.

Methodology
To systematically assess scholarship about social media brands, we closely replicated
Rains and Brunner’s sampling procedure, but included own our unique set of variables
(e.g. academic context, geographic focus, media repertoires) and extended the time
frame to include a full decade of scholarship. We content analyzed every article pub-
lished between 2005 and 2014 in six interdisciplinary journals: Computers in Human
Behavior; Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; Information
Communication & Society; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication; and New Media & Society. As Rains and Brunner
(2015) explained, while other journals have the potential to be included in such an analy-
sis, the main dynamics that drove publication selection were (1) their focus on the social
influences of information and communication technologies and (2) scholars who pub-
lished in these journals have been trained in a myriad of social science fields—most
notably communication, psychology, and computer science, providing an array of inter-
disciplinary perspectives on social media. Viewed in this manner, these six journals con-
tained a considerable number of studies about social media that could provide insights on
how patterns of scholarship are upheld across the social sciences more generally. Using
these same six journals, Rains and Brunner (2015) found no evidence of social network-
ing studies published from 1997 to 2005, thus our data collection began with studies
published in 2005 to provide a longitudinal examination of social media scholarship over
the course of the past decade.

Sample
Each issue from the aforementioned six journals was reviewed to identify articles that
analyzed (broadly defined) one or more social media brands. Employing the social media
Stoycheff et al. 971

definition presented above, we included studies that examined at least one specific brand
of online platforms that relied on user-generated content and facilitated a two-way audi-
ence interaction, beyond any specified recipient. This broad definition encompassed a
wide range of brands and sub-genres, including SNS (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), blogs
and microblogs (e.g., LiveJournal, Twitter, Weibo), content-sharing websites (e.g.,
YouTube, Flickr), bookmarking sites (e.g., Pinterest, Delicious), wikis (e.g., Wikipedia),
and virtual communities (e.g., SecondLife). Studies that examined general social media
sites without specifying a brand name were excluded, as were fictional sites designed for
the purposes of academic investigation, and articles that offered no empirical results. A
total of 663 articles were identified as using specific social media brands across the six
journals, and 344 of them examined Facebook (52%).
Building upon Rains and Brunner’s (2015) coding scheme that captured only the
brand of SNS and each study’s methodological approach (see also Snelson, 2016), this
analysis coded three additional variables: academic context, geographic region, and the
presence of media repertoires. The coders inductively generated 11 thematic content
areas in which the social media studies were situated, including personality traits and/or
memory, interpersonal relationships and/or social capital, political and/or government
communication, journalism and/or mass media, health, education, fundraising and/or
crowdsourcing, privacy, science and/or environment, organizational and/or corporate
uses, and disaster and/or crisis contexts. Categories were not mutually exclusive.
The authors also coded this selection of articles to determine whether the social media
brand(s) examined were headquartered in the United States or indigenous to another
country, and whether the context studied US or non-US participants and social media
content. Non-US contexts were additionally classified as either democratic (free) or non-
democratic (partly free, not free) using Freedom House’s 2016 Freedom of the World
scoring metric. Finally, coders noted whether each article investigated a brand in isola-
tion or compared two or more social media brands. Ten percent of the total sample was
selected to test intercoder reliability using Krippendorf’s α, which met or exceeded .80
for all variables, and after discussion, complete agreement was reached on low-incidence
categories.

Results
As observed in Table 1, Facebook continues to eclipse all other brands, even after incor-
porating a vast array of social media sub-genres, including but not limited to, SNS, (micro)
blogs, wikis, content-sharing sites, virtual worlds, and review sites. And its dominance
grows over time, representing 60% of the social media scholarship in 2014. The micro-
blogging platform, Twitter, and video-sharing site, YouTube, accounted for a respective
16.7% and 7.8% of the total literature, and other brands, including Second Life, Wikipedia,
Cyworld, and China’s microblogging platform, Sina-Weibo, were represented in multiple
academic investigations. Accounting for <1% of all studies were those featuring Hyves,
Instagram, Reddit, Yelp, Tumblr, Flickr, and non-US-based brands like QQ and Habbo
Hotel. Studies featuring newer brands like Snapchat, Whisper, and YikYak were entirely
absent. The vast majority of articles (84.3%) examined the uses and effects of one brand
in isolation, as opposed to part of a larger media repertoire.
972 new media & society 19(6)

Table 1.  Social media brands analyzed in social science scholarship.

Facebook Twitter YouTube MySpace Second Wikipedia Cyworld Weibo All other
Life brands (e.g.
RenRen,
Reddit,
Instagram,
and Pinterest)
2005 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4
2006 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 4
2007 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 8
2008 11 0 2 9 1 2 4 0 16
2009 13 0 5 7 1 2 1 0 15
2010 10 1 6 9 3 4 1 0 18
2011 36 11 5 5 4 4 3 0 16
2012 62 20 11 6 8 1 1 2 26
2013 97 40 12 6 6 4 3 0 25
2014 114 39 7 3 5 3 1 7 41
Total 51.9% 16.7% 7.2% 6.8% 4.2% 3.2% 2.3% 1.4% 26.1%

Studies that employed two or more brands were represented in each appropriate category.
The counts here represent a slightly more inclusive agreement between our coders on inclusion criteria
that constituted “analyzing” one or more particular brands than Rains and Brunner’s (2015) original coding.
Small differences may also be attributable to how this study did not rely on a Boolean search and instead
conducted a thorough review of each article in these publications.

Of the 663 studies included in the sample, the majority were situated in US contexts
(62.3%), with only 13.9% of studies employing a brand that was headquartered outside
the United States. Most of this international diversity was concentrated in Western
Europe (N = 110) and Southeast Asia (N = 98), but a few notable investigations were con-
ducted in understudied countries in the Global South, like Colombia (Velasquez, 2012)
and Pakistan (Murthy and Longwell, 2013); only 6% of articles examined social media
in a non-democratic context.
Our analysis also provided unique insight into the academic contexts in which studies
using social media brands were situated. We found that scholarship examining social
media’s role in building and maintaining interpersonal relationships and/or social capital
was the most popular context, which accounted for 38.9% of all studies. And research
that examined personality traits and/or memory and psychological processing accounted
for 154 cases in the sample (23.2%). Another sizable percentage (16%) of social media
scholarship was situated in the context of politics and/or governmental affairs. There
were 69 total cases examining social media privacy concerns, which accounted for
10.4% of the total sample, of which 61 (or 88.4%) focused on privacy with specific
regard to the Facebook brand. Less frequently studied social media contexts included
education (8.1%), health and/or medical contexts (6.2%), organizational and/or corpo-
rate issues (4.5%), social media’s role in comparison to journalism and mass media
(3.5%), science and/or environment (0.9%), and crowdsourcing and/or fundraising
(0.6%). These results, which include a breakdown of Facebook-specific contexts, are
Stoycheff et al. 973

Table 2.  Thematic areas of social media study.

Scholarly contexts Percentage of Percentage of

total studies Facebook studies
Interpersonal communication or social capital 38.9 48.3
Personality traits/memory 23.2 26.7
Politics and governance 16.0 12.5
Privacy 10.4 17.7
Education 8.1 7.3
Health and medical 6.2 5.8
Organizational or business or corporate 4.5 3.2
Journalism/mass media 3.5 2.3
Disaster and crisis 1.2 0.3
Science and environment 0.9 0.0
Fundraising and crowdsourcing 0.6 0.0
Other contexts 19.8 13.4

Notes: Studies situated at the intersection of two or more contexts were counted in each category.
Other contexts included religion, feminism, morality and ethics, motivations for technology use, sports,
fandom, and so on.

summarized in Table 2. Naturally, these findings do illustrate more diversity than Rains
and Brunner’s (2015) findings, which were specific to SNS, but a persistent majority of
Facebook-focused scholarship suggests a continued problematic privileging of the
Facebook brand. We critically add to Rains and Brunner’s (2015) five implications in
light of the expanded scope of this analysis and discuss the academic contexts, geo-
graphic areas, and media repertoires that are ripe for further social media investigation.

Expanding academic contexts

While the broadened scope of this study did yield a wider range of brands than Rains and
Brunner’s (2015) original findings, over half of all social media studies specifically ana-
lyzed Facebook, which perpetuates concerns about the generalizability of existing schol-
arship, particularly in terms of academic subfields. As a SNS, Facebook’s primary
function is to facilitate interpersonal communication (Ellison and boyd, 2013), which
makes its uses and effects theoretically and normatively distinct from social media that
prioritize other affordances, like content creation, curation, and dissemination. We see
this reflected in our study results. Nearly 40% of the published research included in this
sample theoretically or normatively investigated interpersonal relationships, communi-
cation patterns, or social capital, which coincides with Ngai et al. (2015) finding that
social capital theories dominate this body of literature.
One particular advantage of the study of social media is its ability to span levels of
analysis—from research that examines the psychological makeup of social media users
at the micro-level (e.g., Hughes et al., 2012), to trends in cross-national differences at the
macro-level (e.g., Stoycheff et al., 2016), and everything in between. And while greater
diversity of social media research can be found in specialty subfield journals (e.g., Health
974 new media & society 19(6)

Communication, Political Communication, Science Communication), greater efforts

could be made by editors and conference organizers to promote these communication
and information technology publications as an academic home for all social media schol-
ars. Doing so would open the door for more investigations that examine how communi-
cation patterns and relationships work with other social media brands and extend into
corporate, educational, health, science, and mass media contexts. This would facilitate
more robust theoretical approaches that span levels of analysis and enrich our under-
standing of social media processes.
One highly salient issue that has the potential to cut across academic subfields and
brands is user privacy on social media sites (e.g., Vitak, 2012). But our analyses found
that 88% of social media studies that empirically investigated users’ privacy concerns
and settings targeted the Facebook platform, suggesting that the field’s collective under-
standing of users’ attitudes about social media privacy and corporate policies is very
limited outside the Facebook context. This poses a particularly problematic concern as
younger generations of social media users opt for brands where privacy—to the point of
anonymity—is a coveted, defining feature (Pew Research Center, 2015). New social
media platforms, like YikYak and Whisper, operate under a model that allows users to
mask their identities, which may influence the underlying processes that explain how
individuals communicate, create, and share information. Social media privacy has
important implications for Facebook and interpersonal relationships, but it also affects a
wide range of other brands and academic areas, like corporate policies, journalistic prac-
tices, security studies, education environments, and sensitive political and health infor-
mation sharing, among others. Identifying these shared issues that can bring together
scholars to incorporate more academic and brand diversity may be a good place to start.

Promoting geographic diversity

Apart from the issue of focusing on one social media brand that privileges a particular
academic context, Rains and Brunner (2015) suggest that the large amount of SNS
research devoted to Facebook over-prioritizes users of that brand and highlights their
attitudes and practices as normative, which may consequently overlook or marginalize
users of other brands. Our results aggregate these concerns on a global level. In particu-
lar, they echo boyd and Ellison’s (2007) sentiment that scholars have “a limited under-
standing of who is and who is not using these sites, why and for what purposes, especially
outside the US” (p. 224).
Although Facebook is the most dominant social networking site in the world, aca-
demic inquiry does not yet reflect the large diversity of social media brands used by
individuals outside the United States and Western Europe. Despite global diffusion of
social media and a vast array of language-specific and indigenous platforms, it is evident
that scholarship published in these journals maintains a Western bias. While efforts to
internationalize the study of social media have been commendable, with 37.6% examin-
ing social media use in a non-US context, only 13.9% of these studies analyze a non-US
social media brand, which is out of sync with the increasingly diversifying field of non-
US-based platforms. As of April 2016, QQ, China’s top SNS, had over 853 million active
users, making it the second most visited social media brand worldwide behind Facebook
Stoycheff et al. 975

(Statista, 2016). However, compared with 344 studies investigating the Facebook brand,
only a single study in the sample examined QQ, indicating social media research under-
privileges indigenous sites whose users may differ dramatically from those of Facebook,
in terms of their demographics, attitudes, behaviors, and ways of processing online infor-
mation (Beer, 2008; Hargittai, 2007; Rains and Brunner, 2015).
One study that examined the Chinese microblogging brand Weibo revealed that there
are indeed important differences among the motivations of user groups (Zhang and
Pentina, 2012). While social media users primarily engage with Twitter to fulfill social
and informational goals, Chinese citizens use Weibo to facilitate professional develop-
ment and self-promotion. These Weibo users were significantly more likely to be driven
by self-expression, and female users in particular were motivated by citizenship, or
wanting to provide help and information to others (Zhang and Pentina, 2012). Given
these differences in motivations, it is only natural to believe there might very well be
differences in terms of how individuals use these platforms to maintain relationships,
obtain information, respond to advertising, and many of the other scholarly outcomes of
interest to researchers.
A discussion of social media’s geographic diversity would be amiss not to also rec-
ognize the cultural and political environments in which these brands are embedded.
Only a small fraction of research (40 articles, or 6.0%) conducted in the past decade has
been situated in non-democratic countries, despite that the majority of world citizens
live under political oppression (Freedom House, 2016) where surveillance and censor-
ship practices can significantly alter social media use (King et al., 2014; Penney, 2016;
Stoycheff, 2016). Future social media scholarship should not only seek to extend beyond
the Western world, it should also make a concerted effort to incorporate and lend com-
parisons to non-democratic countries, where the very fundamental assumptions of free-
dom of expression and free flows of information are jeopardized. While the tremendous
popularity of Facebook certainly makes it a target worthy of investigation (Wilson
et al., 2012), over-reliance on Facebook scholarship poses the risk of stereotyping all
social media users as Caucasian, educated, young adults, who are small-d democrats,
which in turn may underprivilege groups and contexts that are not well represented by
the Facebook brand.

Understanding media repertoires

Finally, over-privileging a particular social media brand in social science scholarship
raises questions about its potential unique effects. Although our data do show consider-
ably more variation than Rains and Brunner’s review of SNS specifically, these results
indicate that Facebook’s scholastic dominance appears to be growing—rather than
diminishing—with time. In 2012, 56% of studies in our analysis analyzed the Facebook
brand, and in both 2013 and 2014 that percentage grew to over 60% of all social media
scholarship. While the Facebook brand remains the global leader in social media
accounts, its adoption has stagnated as more users—especially teens—are gravitating
toward content-sharing communities, like Instagram, social bookmarking sites, like
Pinterest, and mobile-only platforms, like Snapchat (Pew Research Center, 2015;
Statista, 2016).
976 new media & society 19(6)

And a recent Pew Research Center report (Duggan et al., 2015) found that the major-
ity of social media users now use multiple social media brands on a regular basis, which
stands in stark contrast to the 559 (84.3%) social media studies included in this analysis
that examine uses and effects of one brand in isolation; of these, 49% exclusively
employ Facebook. With increased choice in online platforms, individuals commonly
use sets of channels to simultaneously satisfy various needs, known as media reper-
toires (Kim, 2016; Yuan, 2011). By examining brands individually, research is only able
to obtain a “partial picture” (Kim, 2016: 2) of how individuals use social media and its
consequent results.
In a nationally representative sample, Taneja et al. (2012) identified four distinct
media repertoires that people use for work, information seeking, entertainment, and
mobile communication — wherein collective social media use largely complemented
legacy media patterns. But other research suggests that brands are likely to produce dif-
ferential effects. For example, Facebook appears to have a stronger effect on political
participation than Twitter (Valenzuela et al., 2014), and marketing strategies for promo-
tional self-presentation and brand centrality exhibit varying levels of success across
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Smith et al., 2012). This raises the important question
of what are the net effects of social media influence on individuals who routinely encoun-
ter information or communication across different channels? More concerted replication
efforts are needed to better reflect the external validity that social media collectively
exert on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors.
Similarly, we know that certain personality traits predict social media usage (Correa
et al., 2010; Rosenberg and Egbert, 2011; Skues et al., 2012; Zhong et al., 2011), like
those who are more sociable and neurotic are more likely to use Facebook, while Twitter
users tend to display greater levels of openness (Hughes et al., 2012). But these results
are typically calculated of each brand independently, and far less is known about the
psychological makeup of individuals who regularly use various social media repertoires
and their motivations for doing so. While a few admirable studies have investigated the
uses and effects of more than one social media platform (e.g., Kujath, 2011; Macafee and
Simone, 2012), many more are needed to arrive at a better understanding of how social
media — and general media — repertoires may collectively shape individuals’ attitudes
and behaviors, rather than the Facebook brand alone.

Conclusion
This review built upon Rains and Brunner’s findings to provide a comprehensive exami-
nation of interdisciplinary scholarship on social media brands published over the past
decade. While we caution against generalizing our results beyond the six communication
and information technology journals from which our census was drawn, we do believe
they offer some important insights into trends in social science research. We also acknowl-
edge that there have been meaningful social media contributions that either do not specify
a particular brand, or focus on theory development rather than empirical analysis and thus
landed outside the scope of our study. The selection of these journals was an intentional
effort to replicate and extend the scope of Rains and Brunner’s original analysis. In doing,
it also allowed for a deep dive into the content of articles, which produced complementary
Stoycheff et al. 977

evidence that adds nuance to meta-analytical overviews on social media (Boulianne,

2015; Snelson, 2016; Van Osch and Coursaris, 2014). For example, Van Osch and
Coursaris (2014) found that researchers at US and UK institutions produced more than
70% of the existing social media scholarship up until 2011, concluding that the domain
“displays limited intellectual diversity” (p. 300). Our results, which examined the content
of this scholarship during an even longer time frame, reveal that these scholars heavily
prioritize US and Western social media brands and their users. Taken together, we see a
geographic deficit that operates on two levels, such that more conscious efforts to include
scholars from other regions and research about indigenous brands are both necessary to
increase the diversity of social media scholarship moving forward.
The analysis also provided novel findings that identified sub-genres of social media
brands and contexts that have been largely underexplored, particularly social media in
corporate, mass media, educational, and health contexts, and greater attention to the
privacy features of other brands. Over-privileging of the Facebook brand suggests how
much future work would benefit from extending the theoretical implications of isolated
studies to entire media repertoires to ensure greater external validity. Additionally,
because social media transcends levels of analysis and serves as a nexus for interpersonal
and mass media scholars, it would be advantageous for both camps to have a sustaining
presence in these publications so researchers could work together to build multilevel,
robust theoretical approaches that allow for more generalization beyond a single social
media brand.
The results presented here and in Rains and Brunner’s (2015) original review show
that social network and social media brands are not given equal attention in the existing
literature. Failure to do so has resulted in a body of scholarship that, for all its merits,
contains Western and interpersonal communication biases and largely examines
Facebook independent of other media uses and effects. As social media users continue to
diversify beyond the Facebook brand, it is imperative for researchers to consider how
unique platforms, user groups, repertoires, and scholarly contexts will shape the field’s
collective understanding of all these burgeoning new technologies.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biographies
Elizabeth Stoycheff is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Wayne State University. Her
research examines the intersection of new media technologies, public opinion, and democratization.
Juan Liu is a doctoral candidate at Wayne State Univerity whose research focuses on social media,
digital divides, online expression, and political polarization.
Kunto A. Wibowo is a doctoral candidate at Wayne State University whose research interests
explore the consequences of algorithms and big data on political attitudes and behaviors.
Dominic P. Nanni is a doctoral student at Wayne State University whose research interests com-
bine democratic theory with critical media studies and critical pedagogy.