University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Upvoting the news: breaking news aggregation, crowd collaboration, and algorithm-driven attention on reddit.com

(USC Thesis Other)

Upvoting the news: breaking news aggregation, crowd collaboration, and algorithm-driven attention on reddit.com

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Upvoting the News: Breaking News Aggregation, Crowd Collaboration, and Algorithm-Driven Attention on reddit.com Alexander C. Leavitt A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION) August 2016 Copyright 2016 Alexander C. Leavitt This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. ii Epigraph Always try your best. - Mom iii Acknowledgements First, my heartfelt thanks goes out to my committee – Henry Jenkins, Dmitri Williams, Mike Ananny, and Dennis Wixon – for all of their guidance and feedback throughout these five years and intense writing period. I certainly cannot forget the great support of friendship, counsel, and even mutual work on parts of this dissertation with Josh Clark and Brian Keegan. With all their help in my qualifying exams and related research projects, a big thank you goes out to Paul Lichterman, François Bar, Lian Jian, and Peter Monge. Many people have provided pointers throughout the process of exploring the dissertation topic; thank you to Nikki Usher, Kate Starbird, Chris Anderson, Amanda Hughes, Karine Nahon, and all of the faculty at the 2015 CSCW Doctoral Consortium. This dissertation would not have succeeded at its current scale without the help of Jason Baumgartner (also known as Stuck_In_The_Matrix, who provided the historical dataset), the many redditors who volunteered their time for interviews, as well as Reddit1 and Reddit2 for inviting me to the reddit headquarters to discuss the topics presented within. I would not have survived the process without the unwavering friendship, weekly lunches, and late night board game sessions of Jan Florjancyzk, José Gonzalez, and Patrick Davison. The dissertation work was supported by a USC Graduate School Endowed Fellowship and a USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship. Finally, all my love to Mom, Dad, and especially Ashley for their love and putting up with these five years of hard work. iv Table of Contents Upvoting the News: Breaking News Aggregation, Crowd Collaboration, and Algorithm- Driven Attention on reddit.com .................................................................................................... i Epigraph ........................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xi Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ xv Ch. 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Aurora, Colorado: July 2012 ..................................................................................................................1 Social Media News Consumption & Production ..................................................................................5 Peer Information Aggregation & Gatekeeping in New Media Contexts ............................................6 Reddit’s Role in News ...........................................................................................................................10 Contribution ...........................................................................................................................................13 Chapter Outline .....................................................................................................................................15 Ch. 2: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework ...................................................................... 17 From Gatekeeping to Network Gatekeeping ......................................................................................17 Gatekeeping .........................................................................................................................................17 Network Gatekeeping ..........................................................................................................................20 Applications of Network Gatekeeping ...........................................................................................................24 Aggregation ............................................................................................................................................27 Two Perspectives on Aggregation ......................................................................................................28 Gatewatching ..................................................................................................................................................28 Curated Flows .................................................................................................................................................29 v Design & Aggregation ........................................................................................................................31 Visibility .........................................................................................................................................................32 Aggregation and News ........................................................................................................................35 Peer Information Aggregation .............................................................................................................37 Breaking News .......................................................................................................................................37 Defining Events ...................................................................................................................................38 Breaking News in Journalism .............................................................................................................40 Breaking News in Crisis Communication ...........................................................................................44 Intersections of Journalism and Crisis Communication .................................................................................46 Breaking News in Online Peer Production .........................................................................................48 Coordination, Collective Action, & Design ...................................................................................................49 Peer Production & News ................................................................................................................................50 Intersections of Peer Production, Journalism, and Crisis Communication ....................................................53 Network Gatekeeping as a Lens for Peer Information Aggregation ................................................53 Ch. 3: Data & Method ................................................................................................................ 56 Reddit, a “Social News Site” .................................................................................................................56 Subreddits ............................................................................................................................................57 Contributions .......................................................................................................................................59 Links & “Self” (Text) Posts ...........................................................................................................................59 Comments .......................................................................................................................................................60 Private Messages ............................................................................................................................................60 Live Threads ...................................................................................................................................................60 Votes ...................................................................................................................................................61 Ranking & Filtering Algorithms .........................................................................................................63 Karma ..................................................................................................................................................65 User Profiles ........................................................................................................................................66 vi Moderators & Administrators .............................................................................................................66 Community & Subculture ...................................................................................................................67 News Spaces on reddit ........................................................................................................................68 Method ....................................................................................................................................................69 Trace Ethnography ..............................................................................................................................69 Ethnographic Methodology .................................................................................................................73 Data .........................................................................................................................................................74 Server Logs .........................................................................................................................................74 Identifying Cases: Breaking News Events .....................................................................................................75 Interviews & Participant Observation .................................................................................................77 Participant Observation ..................................................................................................................................77 Interviews .......................................................................................................................................................78 Ch. 4: Motivations and Values for Peer Information Aggregation ........................................ 81 Why reddit for News .............................................................................................................................82 Convenience ........................................................................................................................................83 Comparisons to Other Organizations and Platforms ...........................................................................84 Differences in Source Variety ........................................................................................................................84 Speed ..............................................................................................................................................................88 Crowd Participation ........................................................................................................................................90 Participants and Experiences ...............................................................................................................92 Professionals and Volunteers .........................................................................................................................94 Prior Experience and Past Events ...................................................................................................................96 Motivations for Contributing to News Aggregation on reddit ........................................................100 Interested & Available ......................................................................................................................101 Individual Motivations ......................................................................................................................104 Local Expertise .............................................................................................................................................104 vii Translation ....................................................................................................................................................106 Local Coverage .............................................................................................................................................109 Topical Expertise ..........................................................................................................................................110 Unique Information ......................................................................................................................................113 Lack of Motivation .......................................................................................................................................114 Audience Motivations .......................................................................................................................115 Imagined Audiences .....................................................................................................................................116 Emergent Audiences .....................................................................................................................................117 Responding to Audience Needs ....................................................................................................................121 Lack of Motivation .......................................................................................................................................122 Network Motivations ........................................................................................................................123 Expectations for Additional Participants ......................................................................................................125 Too Much Information .................................................................................................................................128 Reddit as a Community “News Source” ......................................................................................................129 News Values .........................................................................................................................................131 The Perceived Size of Developing Events ........................................................................................133 Detecting Size from Established Reporting .................................................................................................133 The Value of “Big” vs. “Small” Stories .......................................................................................................136 Striving for “Facts” and Objective Information ................................................................................140 Misinformation .............................................................................................................................................142 Bias ...............................................................................................................................................................144 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................144 Ch. 5: The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation ......................................................... 147 Searching for Entry Points .................................................................................................................149 Main Subreddits for News ............................................................................................................................149 Filtering Algorithms for News .....................................................................................................................152 Topical Subreddits for News ........................................................................................................................153 viii Encountering Multiple Posts ........................................................................................................................154 Contributing Aggregated Information ..............................................................................................159 Information Contributions .................................................................................................................161 Length ...........................................................................................................................................................162 Formats: Bullet Points, Summaries, and More .............................................................................................163 Live Threads as Design Intervention ............................................................................................................171 Relevance .....................................................................................................................................................173 Sourcing and Verifying Information .................................................................................................175 Sourcing ............................................................................................................................................178 Verifying Information .......................................................................................................................184 Verification Through Triangulation .............................................................................................................185 Rumors, Uncertainty, and Problems in Triangulation ..................................................................................188 Verification Through Feedback ....................................................................................................................192 Editing Contributions ...................................................................................................................................196 Placing the Responsibility on the Reader .....................................................................................................199 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................201 Ch. 6: Collaboration & Coordination ..................................................................................... 203 Case Study: Coordinating Information from MH370 .......................................................................205 Adding More People ............................................................................................................................213 Inclusion & Vetting ...........................................................................................................................213 Coordinating Groups .........................................................................................................................216 Explicit Coordination ...................................................................................................................................217 Implicit Coordination ...................................................................................................................................219 Maintaining Order ........................................................................................................................................225 Moderators Working Together ..........................................................................................................228 Organizing Moderator Tasks .............................................................................................................229 Getting More Moderators Involved ..............................................................................................................230 ix External Channels for Coordination .............................................................................................................232 Coordinating Non-Moderator Volunteers .........................................................................................236 Limiting the Amount of People ....................................................................................................................239 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................240 Ch. 7: Roles and Designs: Platform Gatekeeping & Visibility ............................................. 243 Visibility and Attention in Sociotechnical Systems ..........................................................................246 Algorithmic Filtering through Voting and Ranking ..........................................................................247 Voting ...........................................................................................................................................................248 Voting as Filtering for Ranking ....................................................................................................................252 Timing and Ranking .....................................................................................................................................254 Threats to Good Ranking: The Character Cap .............................................................................................257 When Votes Don’t Matter ............................................................................................................................260 Platform Governance: Moderators & Admins .................................................................................262 Infrastructure, Engineering, & Design ..............................................................................................264 Servers ..........................................................................................................................................................264 Ranking Algorithms .....................................................................................................................................267 Moderators and Tools ...................................................................................................................................270 Monitoring & Deleting ......................................................................................................................272 Monitoring ....................................................................................................................................................273 Deleting ........................................................................................................................................................275 Tools: AutoModerator ..................................................................................................................................283 Differences in Live Threads .........................................................................................................................285 Monitoring and Removing Participants ........................................................................................................287 Direct Promotion: Circumventing Design ........................................................................................290 Defaulting .....................................................................................................................................................291 Stickied Submissions & Links ......................................................................................................................291 “Sticky” Links ..............................................................................................................................................293 x Participants’ Reactions to Stickying .............................................................................................................299 Megathreads .................................................................................................................................................300 Small Updates Matter: Tags, Flair, & Filters ...............................................................................................302 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................305 Ch. 8: Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 307 Summary of Findings ..........................................................................................................................307 Who Participates in Peer Information Aggregation ..........................................................................308 The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation ................................................................................308 How People Collaboration in Peer Information Aggregation ...........................................................309 How Design Shapes Peer Information Aggregation .........................................................................309 Peer Information Aggregation & Network Gatekeeping ..................................................................310 Limitations and Future Research ......................................................................................................315 Design Implications .............................................................................................................................317 Final Words ..........................................................................................................................................320 Addendum (June 20, 2016) .................................................................................................................321 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 324 xi List of Figures Figure 1. Network gatekeeping practices identified by Barzilai-Nahon where gated can contribute and impact the gatekeeping process (2008, p. 1497). .......................................... 22 Figure 2. Typological framework of news aggregation (Coddington, 2015, 25). ........................ 36 Figure 3. Results of the Seasonal Hybrid ESD model from a sample of late 2014 data per hour. Blue circles are anomalies detected in the given time frame using parameters set at max anomalies (2%), p-value of 0.01, and threshold of 95% confidence. ................................... 76 Figure 4. A detailed comment thread, split into three images, by theearthquakeguy in response to an explosion in Waco, Texas. ............................................................................................. 112 Figure 5. Pageviews and unique visitors per hour to the /r/LosAngeles subreddit ..................... 135 Figure 6. Histograms of the number of posts and comments in reaction to the November 2015 Paris attacks over time, showing how the major news subreddits and local subreddits (/r/news, /r/france, /r/worldnews, /r/europe) were some of the first communities to report on the event, followed by a variety of others. .......................................................................... 151 Figure 7. The “new” queue of /r/news shortly after the first announcements of the late 2015 Paris attacks. Paris-related contributions are highlighted in yellow. ........................................... 155 Figure 8. The number of posts based on length of the total updates, ranging from short length (one to two paragraphs) to long (reaching the maximum number of characters). .............. 163 Figure 9. A short comment thread aggregating information in “bullet point” style about the MH370 plane disappearance.The author lists links and information in short lines with “edits” in chronological order. ............................................................................................ 164 xii Figure 10. A medium comment thread aggregating information in “summary” style about a bus explosion in Russia. The author includes links, but generally the information is presented in a summarized, narrative style. ............................................................................................ 164 Figure 11. The number of contributions that contain a summary format for included information. ............................................................................................................................................. 166 Figure 12. The number of contributions that contain bullet point formats (including “edits”). Few equates to less than one-third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. ..................................................................................................... 166 Figure 13. The number of contributions that include timestamps. Few equates to less than one- third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. ............................................................................................................................................. 168 Figure 14. The number of contributions that include emergency information. .......................... 169 Figure 15. Users trying to coordinate the creation of a live thread and then linking to it in a comment. ............................................................................................................................. 173 Figure 16. The number of contributions that contain links to external websites or media. Few equates to less than one-third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. ..................................................................................................... 180 Figure 17. A moment of early coordination between mrgandw and de-facto-idiot in the comments of a reddit thread. ............................................................................................... 208 Figure 18. Screenshot of the /r/worldnews subreddit after the late 2015 Paris attacks. At various moments, reddit’s servers crashed, sending this message to viewers. ................................ 265 Figure 19. Mathematical notation for the “hot” algorithm on reddit. ......................................... 267 xiii Figure 20. In chronological order, the titles of the posts deleted by moderators of the /r/losangeles subreddit within the first hour after an earthquake in Los Angeles. .............. 282 Figure 21. A screenshot of the reddit front page on October 28, 2012, showing the /r/sandy advertisement displayed in the right column. ..................................................................... 295 Figure 22. Estimated number of subscribers at a given second in /r/sandy. ............................... 296 Figure 23. Estimated number of simultaneous viewers at a given second in /r/sandy. .............. 296 Figure 24. Automated invitation to join the live thread as a contributor, sent over private message to the author. ....................................................................................................................... 298 Figure 25. Invitation to join the /r/Europe live thread created by a reddit administrator, sent over private message to the author. ............................................................................................. 299 Figure 26. Moderators added a flair tag to the left side of the title in order to correct the information that could not be edited in the title. ................................................................. 303 Figure 27. The process of peer information aggregation. Information from journalists, experts, and user-generated content and news from media organizations are put through a process of gatekeeping, where algorithms, governing moderators/administrators, and crowds provide feedback and visibility to particular information. Aggregation participants draw from timing, values, and experience when choosing, sourcing, and verifying information, all of which is facilitated through the design of the platform and the 1-on-1 and group collaborations over the course of an ongoing event. ........................................................... 311 Figure 28. “Illustration of network gatekeeping” (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008, 1508). ...................... 311 Figure 29. Tweet from Mathew Ingram in response to the reddit information aggregation efforts around the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings. ...................................................... 320 xiv Figure 30. An image of a deleted comment circulated in response to moderators’ deletions of submissions to /r/news. ....................................................................................................... 322 xv Abstract With the increase in adoption of social media platforms for consuming news, ordinary people are also using these spaces to share original information or recirculate published news. While former projects like WikiNews failed in their attempt to create social systems for working together to compile information about news events, more recent systems build on the scale and connectedness of online social communities to allow people to do similar work. How then do people come together in networked sociotechnical systems to collaborate on the peer production of news? This dissertation looks at the practices of peer information aggregation, where individuals and large groups collaborate in the collection and redistribution of information from social media platforms and mainstream media organizations in response to developing events. It uses the case study of reddit.com, a social news site, where participants may contribute links and information from around the internet and rank those contributions through voting, filtering algorithms, and commenting. Using the lens of network gatekeeping, the dissertation explores how individual decision-making, group dynamics, and system design impact what information is included or rejected in the process of providing audiences information about ongoing news events. Through the analysis of more than 50 ethnographic interviews and participant observation, situated in a 2+ billion message historical trace data corpus, I explore the values, decisions, and politics of peer information aggregation in response to local and global crises. While the results demonstrate that participants have little experience doing information work, their ideals resemble those of journalists. However, the complicated technical limitations of reddit’s platform, the dependence on information from mainstream media organizations, the varying levels of explicit coordination within groups, and the politics of moderators and administrators significantly shape the possibilities of successful peer information production. 1 Ch. 1: Introduction Aurora, Colorado: July 2012 On the early morning of July 20, 2012, James Holmes walked into the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, shooting multiple firearms into the theater’s crowds, killing one dozen and injuring over five dozen others. As breaking news alerts popped up from mainstream media organizations, messages began to fill in the gaps on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. One of those other sites was reddit. At 1:07:34 am local time, about an hour after the crisis occurred, a user with the screenname Peener13 arrived in the /r/AskReddit subreddit – a large community for asking and answering questions – and posted, “Someone came into our theater at the midnight release of Dark Knight Rises and began opening fire. Who here on Reddit can help me calm my nerves? 1 ” In a long message to an audience of strangers, she wrote, “I now know what tear gas feels like. I've never had to 'get down' with a police officer screaming at us. This is the most fucked up night of my short life. I need an army of kitten photos stat.” In a matter of minutes, she received a flood of supportive (in addition to some doubtful and negative) messages. She also received – from reddit users as well as representatives of journalistic organizations – a cascade of inquiries asking for more information about what had happened. In a short email interview with me, she recounted that “immediately they were filling my inbox.” A few hours later, at 3:19:28 AM local time, in Peener13’s thread, 18-year-old Morgan Jones, a Denver area native, added a comment under the username integ3r. The comment included a number of updates related to the developing aftermath: following the police scanner, 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wv4q2/someone_came_into_our_theater_at_the_midnight/ 2 he synthesized information from the police with tweets and other messages sent around Twitter and reddit. Later that day, he deleted the comment. The record still exists, if you look hard enough: a handful of other reddit users copied and pasted the text from a cached Google Search page across a chain of child comments. The act of deleting the comment removed integ3r’s username from the submission, but other users mentioned that he had reposted the thread of updates in another post on the /r/news subreddit (added at 3:25:10 AM, only a few minutes after the initial comment in the /r/AskReddit thread). 2 Integ3r surprised the reddit community: he later went on to contribute fourteen full, dense update threads over the course of five days, containing links to police scanner audio, news reports, press releases, tweets, photos, videos, reports about victims, and even emergency contact information. Dozens of other reddit users contributed to his efforts, helping share links and other bits of information; Jones credited them throughout his posts while he acted as the editor of these contributions, picking which information to include and formatting them in his own style. In the aftermath of the tragedy, reactions poured out from the reddit community. In response to integ3r’s first comment in the /r/AskReddit subreddit, one user replied, “this is better than any news report i have ever seen” [sic]. 3 A debate ensued, where a group of users argued whether these efforts were “a straight up timetable of facts, no editorializing” (compared to a report from a news organization that might have “three quarters of a page filled with whatever political/social commentary the reporter wants to use this event to sell” 4 ) or just reporting any 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/wv8t1/comprehensive_timeline_aurora_massacre/ 3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wv4q2/someone_came_into_our_theater_at_the_midnight/c5gr31i 4 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wv4q2/someone_came_into_our_theater_at_the_midnight/c5gs60v 3 information “filled with a bunch unverified facts.” 5 However, another commenter retorted, “This is how you get news as it develops. You have to use your brain to sift through the data as it comes in via social networks and news reports and gather what seems to be solid information, and revise as you learn more.” 6 The “Aurora Massacre Comprehensive Timeline,” as it came to be called, also rippled across the journalistic community. BuzzFeed staff member John Herrman wrote: In the early morning, as professional media scrambled to cover the movie theater shooting in Aurora, CO, the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of information wasn’t a news site or a TV station. It was a series of posts on Reddit … Integ3r, whose post is at the top of Reddit right now, has inarguably contributed more to the early understanding of this tragedy than any other single person. 7 Over at (the now defunct) GigaOm, Mathew Ingram wrote, “We are seeing a new form of journalism emerge… a kind of ‘crowdsourced newsroom…’” 8 Michael Barthel, at Salon, responded to the claim, countering in another article, “[C]itizen journalism is doing more or less the exact same thing that traditional journalism has always done, except not as reliably or sustainably.” 9 He continued, emphasizing that the benefit of faster breaking news reporting does little to improve this chaotic type of information gathering: Crowdsourced journalism doesn’t seem to do long-term investigative journalism well, nor does it do well at identifying and tracing large-scale societal problems, or high-level analyses of medical, scientific or financial news, the kind of things that require expertise. Instead, it’s really good at breaking news about shootings and war, the same “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage that the media is frequently criticized for overemphasizing. And while scoops like Reddit’s discovery of the shooter’s picture are great pelts for media professionals (the ones whose standards citizen journalist proponents otherwise disdain), in an era when any new piece of information is everywhere instantly, it’s unclear what 5 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wv4q2/someone_came_into_our_theater_at_the_midnight/c5gsw23 6 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wv4q2/someone_came_into_our_theater_at_the_midnight/c5gtpbe 7 http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/how-18-year-old-morgan-jones-told-the-world-about#.puMQqRAQNX 8 https://gigaom.com/2012/07/22/learning-from-this-weeks-crash-course-in-citizen-journalism/ 9 http://www.salon.com/2012/07/24/hold_the_reddit_hype/ 4 practical value that has. The rush-to-coverage aspect of news is arguably more of an ill than a good – posters on the Reddit thread complain about it, though only in reference to the “‘legitimate’ news” – and it’s hard to tell why doing the same thing only faster is a laudable improvement. Jay Rosen, on the other hand, argued that generally these kinds of crowd-driven forms of journalistic information aggregation haven’t done enough: “I’m not satisfied that we’re making the progress we should be making with these forms.” 10 He concluded with a petition to investigate these forms and processes of information and news gathering in deeper detail: “Just tell us what the many can do better than the few, try to locate it when you can, and also what the few obviously do better than the many. Try to locate that when you can. The limits of crowd power, the story of when and where and exactly why we need pros with good judgment.” Rosen’s questions form the impetus behind this dissertation: How does crowd-driven information aggregation operate in response to developing events? Many studies have examined responses to crisis that diffuse outward from networked technology platforms, and similarly there have been decades of research dedicated to looking at the practices of news organizations and journalists, but networked information aggregation around news has had little empirical coverage in the academic literature. In this dissertation, I look to online social media platforms as a way to understand the changing norms around collaborating to collect and publish information in high-tempo situations like breaking news events. 10 http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/dont_bust_bogus_hype/ 5 Social Media News Consumption & Production With the proliferation of social media use in the past decade, people increasingly use these platforms for news. Pew Research reported in 2013, for instance, that of the two-thirds of American adults who use Facebook, 47% of them use the platform to get their news (Mitchell, Kiley, Gottfried, & Guskin, 2013). An update in 2015 showed that an increase to two-thirds of Twitter-using and Facebook-using American adults use the platforms for news (up from 52% for Twitter in 2013). Additionally, 59% of people used Twitter and 31% (up from 28% in 2011) used Facebook to keep up with news during an event as it was developing. While people continue to look to social media to consume information about news events, people are also using social media platforms more often to create and share new information about news events. There are now numerous instances of breaking news reported on platforms such as Twitter, whether purposeful or accidental, 11 that are purportedly faster than traditional journalistic enterprises (Hermida, 2010). News – and especially information that becomes news – remains an important object of study, because it demonstrates a focus on particular values of importance that people bring to their daily lives. However, the concept of “news” has shifted for some audiences, as the information that they consume from non-journalistic or mixed-journalistic spaces (like social media) becomes the content that informs them of what they should know (rather than the traditional products produced by professional newsworkers like newspapers and television news reports). The concept of “citizen journalism” has emerged as an alternative and counter-narrative to traditional news reporting. And increasingly, major news stories involve the participation of 11 http://mashable.com/2011/05/02/live-tweet-bin-laden-raid/#YO48TS_A95qL 6 citizens broadcasting information outside the institutional barriers of news organizations. 12 While the term continues to be debated and defined, as Wall (2015) claims, “the act of ordinary people creating media content that includes information (“news”) has become a commonly accepted practice around the world, viewed by millions as alternative, authentic news or even simply as an everyday practice” (807). It is important, then, to extend theories of information and news to the areas where these practices are evolving. Wall argues that one avenue for new research is the analysis of platforms and their communities. While he identifies that “social networking sites continue as key platforms for citizen journalism” (806), this viewpoint limits the scope of possible platform to those designed with explicit connections between users as a focus, ignoring the various changes in online communication technologies (such as algorithmically-organized information systems) that continue to shape the practices of citizen journalism and its audiences. The varying designs of sociotechnical systems impact critical information practices, and expanding the range of case studies that scholars draw upon for theoretical and empirical insights is of vital importance. This dissertation therefore presents a novel case study of a platform designed to organize crowd-driven contributions and how the platform and its community ultimately work within that design to control information flows. Peer Information Aggregation & Gatekeeping in New Media Contexts The object of study in this dissertation is information aggregation. Aggregation focuses on the collection of information from multiple sources, organized and redisplayed to audiences for various purposes. In news contexts, some journalists consider aggregation as distinct from the “original” reporting produced by news organizations (C. W. Anderson, 2013b). In the 12 For example, see http://www.poynter.org/2011/why-the-man-who-tweeted-bin-laden-raid-is-a-citizen- journalist/131135/ 7 aggregation of news, journalists “are practicing a form of work that draws heavily from the traditional core of newswork but also intrinsically relies on the published work of others to gather and shape information” (Coddington, 2015, 2). In the case of reddit, though, the participants are not journalists; instead, they are volunteers that emerge from the network of online communities linked within the reddit platform. The question then becomes how non- journalist participants in the context of online networks and communities deal with the aggregation of information in reaction to events. The information they aggregate might be construed colloquially as news, but it remains distinct from the news products of institutional, journalistic organizations (which usually go through an established organizational set of processes before reaching audiences). Instead, when news is aggregated on reddit or other platforms, participants behave in ways similar to the knowledge production of Wikipedia. Just as large groups of participants on Wikipedia work together to collect, debate, edit, and publish information about topics, information aggregation during developing events involves coordinating multiple people in high-tempo situations to compile information for audiences in emergent ways. Therefore, I distinguish these practices from Coddington’s cases of journalistic aggregation, referring to them as “peer information aggregation” and applying them to cases of developing events (or “breaking news”). By investigating how participants within social media platforms reach to information within the framework of events that journalists and news organizations determine is news, it is possible to see how new perceptions, values, and practices are changing to fit the needs of information consumers, such as through the processes of aggregation. Participants may use news content (ie., reports from journalists) in aggregation, but a theoretical lens of peer information aggregation should remain inclusive of any information that participants might find relevant, “news” or not. 8 One of the most important facets of information aggregation is the process of information transfer – what gets chosen and what gets left out – and in the case of journalism – and increasingly citizen journalism – scholars discuss information transfer through the lens of gatekeeping. In the case of news aggregation, gatekeeping focuses on who the variety of actors are (contributors, editors, and even technologies) and what processes they use to select or ignore certain information. And while gatekeeping theory have kept up with changes in news organizations’ and journalists’ behaviors, crowd-based information practices have rarely been examined or even used to challenge existing theories. Scholars have also questioned how gatekeeping theories will evolve in relation to changing technologies and information networks. For instance, Goode (2009) argues that the idea of a gatekeeper implies human agency when the dynamics and designs of systems exceed individual choice (1294). Thorson & Wells (2015) also claim that, in extending gatekeeping theories to new media contexts, we must increasingly take into account the relationship between individuals and the environments they occupy. They contend that “theorizing the dynamics of message reception and response in this environment increasingly depends on accurately mapping individuals’ positions” within the various information flows produced by people and platforms (2). Further, taking into context the changing organizational structures of networks, Barzilai- Nahon (2008) questions how the roles of gatekeeper and gated shift in relation to one another as both become more interchangeable in settings like user-generated content sites. Shoemaker & Vos (2009) universally acknowledge that the development of a theory and methods for studying gatekeeping process today requires new research: The challenge is for scholars to think creatively about applying the theory to a changing world and to adapt research methodology that keeps pace. It makes little sense to study a changing media landscape with methods developed to study printed newspapers in the pre-computer era. New software is necessary to capture information about ephemeral, 9 always changing internet sites, and we also need advances in ways to analyze the content. (130) Investigating these emergent behaviors and collaborations is important not only for determining the impact of media and predicting its effects but also for assessing the potential for democratic, reflexive cultures of citizen participation (Goode, 2009) and civic behavior (Wall, 2015). Further, by understanding their role in and impact on news, it allows the public to keep these systems, along with their participants, accountable (Cohen, Hamilton, & Turner, 2011). In this dissertation, I use the case study of reddit.com to look at productive and coordinated action around news-related information aggregation and how these emerging, evolving practices help us rethink ideas around gatekeeping in network settings. The primary research question I ask is: How do users in social media systems aggregate information in response to developing events, and how are these practices mediated by network gatekeeping in new media platforms? Colloquially, many people refer to the moments of developing information as “breaking news” events, and I develop the idea of information movement in uncertain and high-tempo contexts at the intersection of three disciplines: sociology of journalism, crisis informatics, and peer production. The mediations I examine in particular are the designs and affordances of the reddit.com platform, such as voting, commenting, live update features, ranking algorithms, moderation roles, and other engineered features of the platform. Drawing from Keegan (2012), I take an “ecological” perspective of these practices, seeing how they span, unite, or avoid a variety of spaces and actors (35). A number of secondary questions emerge: Who are the people that do this kind of work, and what are their motivations, values, and prior experience? What decisions to people make when aggregating information, and does information aggregation face the same limitations during developing events as journalistic responses? How do collaborators work with each other 10 to coordinate tasks? And what are the conflicts and concerns that participants have with the design of the platforms they use to do this aggregation? To examine these practices, the dissertation draws from over 4 years of ethnographic participant observation, an 8-year historical dataset of server log data, and 3 months of in-depth interviews of contributors to information aggregation submission (ranging across posts, comments, threads, and subreddits), moderators of news subreddits, and reddit administrators. Gans' (1980) perspective in studying journalists’ practices motivates this methodological approach to deeply understand how people in peer information aggregation “selected the news and what they left out; how they reported the stories they selected; why they chose as they did; and what kinds of people they were” (xxii). Reddit’s Role in News In the past few years, many scholars have examined the role that connected participants and the technological infrastructures they adopt have played in reporting information faster and more accurately (or, in some situations, slower and incorrectly). In particular, scholars have utilized the open access of Twitter’s data to study responses to planned and unexpected events (Acar & Muraki, 2011; Agarwal & Barthel, 2013; Bruns & Highfield, 2012; Heverin & Zach, 2010; Hughes & Palen, 2009; Hu et al., 2012; Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010; Murthy & Longwell, 2013; Petrovic, Osborne, McCreadie, Macdonald, & Ounis, 2013; F. Schultz, Utz, & Göritz, 2011; Vis, 2013). Other platforms take the contributions of large participant networks and aggregate them in various ways to find the most relevant, important, popular, or engaging information. “Social news sites,” like Slashdot, Digg, or reddit, use various types of engineering to draw from crowds’ activities (like votes) and compound them to provide visibility to certain information over others. By combining the crowd-driven selection of information with the 11 algorithmic presentation of content, social news sites provide a different affordance than sites like Twitter: while Twitter presents information in a flat, time-ordered timeline, social news sites allow viewers to rely on crowd participation to filter out the full collection of messages to surface important or relevant information. In recent years, reddit has gained prominence amongst social media platforms and online communities (for instance, as of April 2016, Alexa.com ranks reddit as the 10 th most-visited website in the United States 13 ). As it has increased in popularity (especially since 2012), reddit has become a platform where more and more people read and engage with news-related information. In 2013, PEW Research found that, of the 3% of American adults that use reddit, 66% of them use reddit for news (higher than every other platform). 14 More recently, in early 2016, PEW Research updated those numbers, reporting that “nearly 8 in 10 reddit users get news on the site.” 15 While people are using platforms like reddit to read and discuss news, they are also using it to share and report news information. In the past 5 years, reddit’s various communities have engaged with information aggregation and news reporting in a variety of ways – from driving viewers to mainstream media organization’s news reports to actively sourcing and verifying content from local sources – many of which evolve as participants experience news events (Leavitt & Clark, 2014). Reddit has also increasingly played a larger role in journalism. On the one hand, reddit has helped reshape news and information diffusion. For example, Poynter reported in 2013 that 13 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com 14 http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-across-social-media-platforms/ 15 http://www.journalism.org/2016/02/25/nearly-eight-in-ten-reddit-users-get-news-on-the-site/ 12 referrals from reddit to news organizations’ websites were significantly increasing. 16 On the other hand, journalists themselves are actively engaging with reddit communities. In the same article, one journalist illustrated his team’s engagement with some subreddits: When we do find an article, or story or photo gallery or video that we feel might resonate particularly well with the Reddit community, we will post it in the relevant subreddit (usually /r/Denver)… We have a few people in the newsroom who are especially big Redditors -- who will post stories there consistently, and not always our work. That's where the real work comes in – cultivating that reputation with good posts that always aren't your own. Not unlike Twitter, but even more niche than that. 17 Daniel Adams, a journalist who operates under the reddit username bostonjourno, explained how he uses the site for information sourcing and question answering. In an interview, he boasted, “Within half an hour, I had 10 emails of people who couldn’t wait to talk about [the story].” 18 Some have argued that reddit has even scooped the mainstream press. Moderators and users of the /r/SyrianCivilWar subreddit, led by updatepronto, spent years collecting information about the crisis, occasionally unearthing information from locals before mainstream media organizations. 19 20 Using Twitter messages, YouTube videos, and word-of-mouth with locals on the ground, members of this news subreddit continue today to source novel information about the region’s developing warfare. The activity peaked in 2013, around which time a Business Insider reporter referred to the community as a “collective research area” that he monitors for news, because information would appear there hours before reaching professional journalists. 21 16 http://www.poynter.org/2013/how-newsrooms-are-using-reddit-what-theyre-learning-from-it/214469/ 17 http://www.poynter.org/2013/how-newsrooms-are-using-reddit-what-theyre-learning-from-it/214469/ 18 http://torystarr.com/2014/12/07/the-role-of-the-journalist-in-the-big-bad-world-of-reddit/ 19 https://gigaom.com/2013/12/17/lessons-in-the-crowdsourced-verification-of-news-from-storyful-and-reddits- syria-forum/ 20 http://dissectednews.com/2013/12/is-reddit-the-best-way-to-follow-the-crisis-in-syria.html 21 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/07/how-the-syrian-war-subreddit-scoops-mainstream-media.html 13 Reddit’s collective action around news reporting and information aggregation has had varying success. In 2013, the /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit contributed to the mass spread of a rumor that misidentified suspects after the Boston Marathon bombing. 22 These complications led to reddit administrators apologizing for the incident 23 and resulted in pop culture memorializations in both The Good Wife and The Newsroom. 24 At the same time, dozens of participants in other subreddits collaborated in a helpful manner to provide news updates and emergency information to thousands of viewers, resulting in 4 of the 10 most-viewed posts (ranked by total pageviews) in 2013 being related to the Boston tragedy’s aggregation efforts. 25 Reddit offers a suitable field site for understanding information aggregation practices primarily because of the emergent practices of its community. In hundreds of instances, volunteers spent dozens of hours compiling, linking, and summarizing information for massive audiences, alongside the reporting of professional journalists and media organizations, but motivated by the potential to contribute to a networked system of global strangers. As naly_d, one volunteer who aggregated information during a few events told me, “There’s no reporting team on reddit… it’s going to be two, three, four, five people who just happen to be on at a certain time… trying to liaise with one another and get the news out.” Contribution This dissertation contributes to scholarship on network gatekeeping, citizen journalism, online collaborations, and social technology use. I expand upon the framework of network gatekeeping 22 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/bombings-trip-up-reddit-in-its-turn-in-spotlight.html 23 http://www.redditblog.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-boston-crisis.html 24 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-harnick/the-good-wife-recap-whack-a-mole_b_4334401.html and http://gawker.com/heres-how-the-newsroom-covered-reddits-failed-boston-bo-1657483136 25 http://www.redditblog.com/2013/12/top-posts-of-2013-stats-and-snoo-years.html 14 by examining the role that the intersection of participation (individuals, small groups, and crowds) and design (voting, algorithms, user roles, etc.) play in the gatekeeping of information in and across social media platforms. I flesh out the concept and issues of “peer information aggregation” by linking aggregation to network gatekeeping theory to further develop an understanding of how aggregation works in social media platforms and to look at how breaking news situations shape these practices. First, the dissertation will contribute to the literature on peer production, crisis informatics, citizen journalism, and online communities. The exploration of reddit’s social news site context will help extend peer production theory to consider the role that impromptu, high- tempo collaborations play outside of a formalized goal-oriented peer production project (like Wikipedia). Further, the role of aggregation in dynamic and developing information contexts will introduce the complexity of applying and adapting mass media theories like gatekeeping to the multi-sited and transforming situations of scalable new media platforms. And second, these investigations will provide additional analysis in the application of network gatekeeping theory to practical but novel case studies. Gatekeeping in digital, mediated environments evolves alongside the technologies. Including crowd-driven collaborations and algorithmic designs into gatekeeping analyses will broaden our understanding of how networked technologies continue to shape information access and control. Tufekci (2014) argues that Twitter has become the Drosophila melanogaster of social media research, a model that has been overused as the “model organism,” which “skews analyses of mechanisms” (2). Pivoting to a new genre of social media platform with differing behavioral norms allows us to generalize network gatekeeping theories to a wider spectrum of actual practices, as well as account for possible social issues present in distinct communities across digital field sites. 15 Chapter Outline The dissertation is broken into eight chapters. In Chapter 2, I introduce a review of the literature that looks at changes in gatekeeping theory to inform the behaviors and practices of information aggregation. I then contextualize information aggregation given the literature on breaking news from journalism, crisis communication, and peer production. In Chapter 3, I present the data and methodology for the subsequent four studies. First, I present details about reddit’s technical system and network of online communities. Then I walk through the methodology for the dissertation, which centers on an analysis of interviews with supporting participant observation in a trace ethnography perspective (Geiger & Ribes, 2011). I also discuss the sampling strategy for identifying cases within peer information aggregation on reddit using a combination of participant observation and large-scale data analysis. Chapters 4 through 7 present four studies of peer information aggregation. I use the framework of network gatekeeping to contextualize the concept of peer information aggregation with the literature on information control, newswork, and peer production while employing specific theoretical lenses to the practices of aggregation contributors. Chapter 4 focuses on the motivations, experiences, and values of contributors, looking at reddit as an alternative news space. I discuss how participants perceive reddit compared to news organizations and other social media platforms. I situate these behaviors against the motivations and news values of journalists and peer production participants. During interviews, participants framed their motivations in terms of individual interest, audience-driven responsibilities, and contributing to a community resource. While prior experiences shaped how people approached developing events, the news values of contributors fell most in line with perceived journalistic values. Chapter 5 presents the processes and factors of information production. I look at the general practices of 16 collecting information, choosing sources, and evaluating information. I look again to journalism to compare participants’ understanding of and approach to sourcing and verification. Surprisingly, in many cases contributors depended on the work of journalists for sourced, trustworthy information. In cases where participants hesitated to post information, they had varying approaches to vetting what they included. Chapter 6 investigates the relationships between collaborators and the coordination action behind information aggregation. In particular, I draw a distinction between explicit and implicit coordination as people work together to aggregate information in comment updates and live threads. On reddit, as groups grew larger, contributors relied more on implicit coordination, though moderators attempted to coordinate their own tasks (as well as those of ordinary participants) through explicit communication in alternative, established channels. Finally, Chapter 7 looks at the conflicts of everyday political power around technological and human control of information visibility in aggregation. I look closely at reddit’s design and how it shapes concerns about being visible through upvotes and ranking algorithms. I also examine the role of moderators and administrators in providing visibility. In general, the technological and social design of reddit provides more control to privileged users, and many conflicts are introduced when participants deal with issues around the visibility of their contributions. Finally, Chapter 8 concludes the dissertation with a brief summary of the findings, implications for designing systems that draw on peer information production, notes on the limitations of the prior studies, and projections for future research. 17 Ch. 2: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Peer information aggregation on reddit sits at the intersection of dynamics of information, attention, and power between the network of actors and technologies involved. One traditional communication theory that helps frame these practices is gatekeeping, which defines the movement of information in terms of “gates” that can be opened or closed to allow or restrict access to some information over others (Barzilai-Nahon, 2009; Lewin, 1943; Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009; White, 1950). In the context of online communication networks and new media technologies, scholars have adapted gatekeeping theories into a contemporary extension called “network gatekeeping” (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008; Ernste, 2014). In this chapter, I first illustrate the concept of gatekeeping and how it applies to online networks. Then, I examine the concept of aggregation, linking its core practices to network gatekeeping using the models of “gatewatching” (Bruns, 2003; Bruns & Highfield, 2015) and “curated flows” (Thorson & Wells, 2015). Finally, to apply these frameworks to the case study of breaking news, I present three models of breaking news and their implications for network gatekeeping, arguing that aggregation draws from a hybrid understanding of information practices in developing, urgent situations from professional journalism, crisis informatics, and online peer production. The chapter concludes with research questions that frame the dissertation’s empirical studies. From Gatekeeping to Network Gatekeeping Gatekeeping Gatekeeping describes forms of control in information systems. When applied to information, gatekeeping is “the process by which the billions of messages that are available in the world get 18 cut down and transformed into the hundreds of messages that reach a given person on a given day” (Shoemaker, 1991). The basic concept suggests that a variety of actors can open or close the “gates” so that certain information passes through while others do not. In the era of broadcast mass media, early gatekeeping theories primarily focused on selection: when a message is moved from story selection to publication, an individual, group, or organization decides to continue or discard the message (White, 1950). The process of gatekeeping frequently involved multiple gatekeepers, each enacting different decisions at points in various channels (Lewin, 1943). As the complexity of information and media systems has increased since the mid-twentieth century, the presence and roles of multiple gatekeepers has shifted organizationally in order to address the management of exponentially more information (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). With regard to news, gatekeeping theories primarily focused on the role of news workers in deciding what information became news. News workers were constrained by the limitations of organizational structure (like “beats,” or the topics to which they were assigned) and media design (like newspaper space or television segment time and formats), and they had to sort through news items and choose which would be included (White, 1950). The role of news workers in relation to each other was an important dynamic within news agencies. For instance, as the first “gate” of story judgment and selection, reporters operated in a different gatekeeping mode than editors (a later “gate”) who chose which stories entered the final publication (and even chose which reporters focused on which assignments; McNelly, 1959). It became important to distinguish that different actors played distinct gatekeeping roles with varying amounts of control over specific channels: for example, the distinction between news gatherers, who define a story, and news processors, who define which stories enter a compiled product (like a radio 19 show; Bass, 1969). Also, it is not just the organizationally-defined roles of people who control information flows. Individual- and group-level factors like personality, values, and ideology – such as ideas around professionalism, bias, and objectivity – greatly impact the decisions that go into gatekeeping (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Eventually, scholars identified “levels” or “hierarchies” of influence, where individual factors (like personal judgment) might be eclipsed by organizational factors (like routines, goals, and policies; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996; Vu, 2014). As digital media and online networks became more prevalent, journalism experienced a shift both in professional organization and everyday practices of audiences. In gatekeeping scholarship, three trends appear to have emerged in describing the process of gatekeeping within digital systems (Bro & Wallberg, 2015). First, gatekeeping exists as a process of information, related to the “linear process of information transmission” (95). Second, gatekeeping has transformed journalism into as a process of communication, whereby experiments in “public journalism” (Nip, 2006) were broadly adopted into active engagement with news audiences, resulting in “a non-linear communication process where news reporters can connect both with citizens and authoritative decision-makers as news sources” (97). And finally, gatekeeping has emerged as a process of elimination, a situation “where the traditional news media might be gradually eliminated as the prime intermediary between private citizens and authoritative decision-makers” (98) resulting in “a point where persons and organizations outside the newsrooms no longer necessarily need the news media to mediate between them” (99). The digitization of news further resulted in a dependence on metrics as journalists and their organizations expanded their focus to include a deeper understanding of how audiences were reacting to their news products. Selection of news for online news websites has in some 20 cases shifted towards recognizing what audiences want to read, especially when organizations rely on advertising revenue from those readers (Vu, 2014). Gatekeeping broadened to include ways to present information to audiences informed by numerical data or predictive analytics, sometimes even including decisions to remove particular stories in favor of others (Tandoc, 2014). Given these developments, the methods by which people respond to events continue to heavily involve gatekeeping. Alongside the rise of digital technologies, news reporters gained the ability to respond to events faster and with more detail. But even increasing the amount of “live” news comes with personal and organizational complications. For example, in developing situations, journalists tended to continue to focus on experts and official sources instead of providing different information, thus maintaining similar styles of gatekeeping as before (Livingston & Bennett, 2003). Increasingly, there is a focus on stories that are sensational, dramatic, and unexpected; stories that include exclusive information compared to other organizations, and stories about the live events that journalists measure are of interest to people (Strömbäck, Karlsson, & Hopmann, 2012). Network Gatekeeping The rise of digital media introduced many new forms of communication media, in which participants played an increasing, participatory role in the production and distribution of information (H. Jenkins, 2006). Networked communication technologies have allowed citizens to participate in the news process to an ever-increasing degree as people publish original media online (Bruns, 2003), and as journalists are increasingly interested in adapting that media or crowdsourcing more information (Aitamurto, 2015). 21 Earlier gatekeeping theories did not focus on the evolving actors, fluid roles, and dynamics of control in digital networks. Barzilai-Nahon (2008) identified that the focus of earlier theories “remains on the role of the gatekeeper rather than understanding how networks (human and technological) and information affect relations between gatekeepers and gated, and their impact on gated” (1495). Therefore, she proposed the concept of network gatekeeping, using the broad definition of “a type of control exercised on information as it moves in and out of gates” (1496). This new gatekeeping concept compensated for the traditional unidirectional and top- down assumptions of gatekeeping control, emphasizing instead the evolving network structures between actors in contemporary communication and organizational forms. Network gatekeeping extends gatekeeping theory to focus on how networks of actors – both human and technological – reflect different (or even previously overlooked) practices of control between gatekeepers and gated individuals or groups within the intersecting processes of gatekeeping (see Figure 1 below), as well as the novel social effects of shifting from hierarchies to networks (Castells, 1996). A modern conception of gatekeeping therefore focuses on the ways that participants formerly conceptualized as a static audience can and do participate and provide feedback to information processes (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). 22 Figure 1. Network gatekeeping practices identified by Barzilai-Nahon where gated can contribute and impact the gatekeeping process (2008, p. 1497). Barzilai-Nahon focuses on four primary differences from traditional gatekeeping which highlight the changing role of gated individuals and groups: political power, or how control over information changes in a network; information production, or how gated actors have the ability to create information; relationships between gatekeepers and gated, such as the ability to provide feedback; and alternatives, or other options for the gated, whether different gatekeeping rules, technologies, platforms, etc. Network gatekeeping in practice may include situations where anywhere from one to all four of these factors are at play, and an increase in these factors in a given situation increases the importance and prominence of the gated individuals. Network gatekeeping especially emphasizes the changing practices and roles within gatekeeping. As Barzilai-Nahon (2008) argues, “Gatekeepers and gated are not monolithic social 23 and political entities nor is their behavior in context of their stakeholders. Accordingly, in a dynamic environment, the interests and goals of the stakeholders constantly change, and so do their gatekeeping and gated roles” (1507). In network settings, like social media platforms, quick interactions between a large multitude of actors can immediately reposition control in particular relationships (particularly at a larger, network level through social interactions; Meraz, 2012). For example, a local citizen uploading mobile video to Twitter during a hurricane will produce different information and result in different control of that information than if a journalist or a police officer were doing the same thing. Further, a highly-connected celebrity recirculating information may result in different audience reach than a journalist. Some scholars have claimed that gatekeeping theories may no longer apply to new contexts complicated by technology, such as Shoemaker & Vos (2009), who claim that now “anyone can become a gatekeeper.” However, such a claim “reduces [gatekeeping’s] theoretical meanings,” because it “conceive[s] of gatekeepers in atheoretical, one-dimensional terms” (Coddington, 2015, 32-33). Instead, network gatekeeping provides a multidimensional framework for understanding the spectrums on which gatekeepers, gated participants, and gatekeeping practices operate, especially when traditional gatekeepers (like media organizations) continue to influence the diffusion of information by maintaining central positions (as well as perceptions of trust) in global communication networks. This dissertation therefore uses network gatekeeping as a theoretical framework for understanding how aggregation as a practice of individuals and groups in online social systems marks shifts in the behaviors of gatekeepers and gated in new media systems. In particular, Barzilai-Nahon (2009) identifies that few studies have been conducted in cases where all four dimensions of network gatekeeping – political power, information production, relationships, and 24 alternatives – are salient for gated participants, and reddit provides an exceptional case study where these factors remain pivotal to the gatekeeping practices of networked online participants. Applications of Network Gatekeeping Scholars have applied network gatekeeping theory to a variety of realms related to sociotechnical systems and online media. Studies vary on whether they analyze network gatekeeping or merely use it as a theoretical framework, but they tend to fall into four categories: uses of platforms, analysis of content, comparison to older forms of gatekeeping, and evaluation of participants. I draw from these four categories to establish gaps in the literature which this dissertation aims to address. First, some studies examine participants’ uses of particular platforms for network gatekeeping. Some studies, especially those examining Twitter, find that participants who are faced with immense amounts of information within large social networks “preserv[e] and amplif[y]” information through platform mechanics like retweeting (Bennett, Segerberg, & Walker, 2014; Nip & Fu, 2015, 245). Sometimes network gatekeeping might apply to a mix of online and offline contexts, such as in the case of a sports team organization that experimented with fan reporting over social media: gatekeepers relaxed control over major channels of communication while applying subtle filters to fans’ communication practices, including access to participating in a social media reporting club (which, coincidentally, participants found empowering; Coddington & Holton, 2014). Participants can also help “elevate others to elite status” in social networks through conversational practices that help promote information and make it seem relevant to other audience members (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013, 21). While these studies address some of the implications of the platforms, they tend to avoid critical discussions of platform design and infrastructure. 25 Second, studies applying network gatekeeping theory look at the content of the information broadcast or shared. These studies tend to look at particular niches of media within the context of network gatekeeping. In one study, international analyses showed that Western mainstream media recreate gatekeeping patterns in the selection and translation of political material from the Middle East, illustrating the impact of multilingual and multiplatform gatekeeping on international news (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2011). Another study demonstrated that participants who recirculate stories on Twitter are more prone to share stories related to social deviance (demonstrating these participants’ values around newsworthiness), though these sharing practices may be moderated by considerations for particular audiences or motivations (Diakopoulos & Zubiaga, 2014). Additional research could look at the breadth of information shared in network gatekeeping contexts. Third, these studies examine comparisons to or interactions with traditional gatekeepers. One study examined how coverage of the Trayvon Martin controversy spanned mainstream media and online network coverage, finding that traditional gatekeeping processes (through mass media like television) can make a stronger impact on issue framing than those of social networks (Graeff, Stempeck, & Zuckerman, 2014). However, mass media framing may actually act as the fuel for online conversations, though the authors find that activists co-creating news can also influence the ultimate framing of major issues. Participants on social networks that engaged with those in traditional gatekeeping roles (like journalists) by promoting personal opinions and agendas may not have influenced those gatekeepers unless they were specifically discussing political or media-related issues (Xu & Feng, 2014). While these studies address journalistic organizations, they do little to compare the exact practices of gatekeeping at the practitioner level. 26 Finally, some studies examine participants and their emergent practices for network gatekeeping, though surprisingly, few studies examine how participants negotiate and craft practices that address the benefits or limitations of participating in network gatekeeping contexts. In one notable project, Shaw (2012) examined a political blog and forum, Daily Kos, where he examined practices of rule creation, agenda setting, and commenting discourses, given the context of gatekeeping from both elite participants and algorithms. The findings show that reputation, demarcated by participants to others, acts as a strong influence in how decentralized gatekeeping discourses played out to set the conversational agenda across the platform. One primary issue that emerges is how elite users adapt the affordances of the platform in their favor in the process of information gatekeeping. All in all, though, little work has been conducted on who participants are and how they address gatekeeping with emergent behaviors. While not all do, those studies that look at network gatekeeping also tend to revolve around specific types of platforms, especially social networks. In addition to the four analytical categories above, this dissertation also builds upon recent network gatekeeping literature to analyze different types of systems. In the past few years, one influential type of large online collective and system has been aggregation platforms. These software systems have rarely been studied from the lens of network gatekeeping, even though they present rich case studies for fluid and evolving behaviors and roles in information circulation. Below, I outline a framework of online information aggregation and how this concept links to network gatekeeping theory for the purpose of highlighting the perceptions and actions that affect information production, circulation, and elimination. 27 Aggregation This dissertation adapts Barzilai-Nahon’s network gatekeeping theory and applies it to a lesser- studied realm: aggregation. Aggregation platforms connect neatly with network gatekeeping theory because of the dynamic roles of participants (from viewers to commenters to elite leaders), crowds (thousands of participants can contribute and vote on content but also debate and provide feedback to gatekeeping decisions), and especially algorithms (how information is presented to audiences when collected and reorganized). Aggregation as a collaborative, networked process fundamentally involves network gatekeeping in practice. Aggregation, put simply, is the collection of information. Frequently, in online contexts, aggregation involves the collection of hyperlinks to websites containing authoritative information, for access and attribution, in a shared space (Coddington, 2015). However, aggregation involves more than collection: it is “taking information from multiple published sources and displaying it in an abbreviated form within a single place” (20). In other words, aggregation reworks already available information into concise formats. These practices are driven by individuals but can be mediated by additional human (personal decision-making, group collaboration, voting, etc.) or technological (filters, algorithms, calculations, etc.) actors. Frequently, aggregation in online systems is described as involving curation. Curation describes the goal “to select and organize, to alter abundance into a collection of manageable size, one that in its smaller shape fulfills an informational or strategic need more efficiently” (Thorson & Wells, 2015, 5). However, curation can be described as different from aggregation. Curation focuses on selection and arrangement, though it also tends to emphasize “manual” aggregation, highlighting curation’s supposed higher quality (i.e., its ability to do “better” work), even though the two words do not entirely differ at a basic level (Coddington, 2015, 28-30). 28 For the purposes of this dissertation, I use aggregation throughout to describe the practices related to both concepts. I choose not to distinguish between the perceived quality identified by Thorson & Wells (2015), because both individuals’ preferences for “curated” information and the “aggregated” information provided by systems intersect to complicate network gatekeeping (which I explore in later chapters). Curation more often focuses on manual aggregation, a practice which is not present in all systems, whereas the concept of aggregation provides greater opportunity generalize to other empirical and theoretical applications. Two Perspectives on Aggregation There are two perspectives from which to understand the creation of aggregated information: the perspective of the participants (information producer), and the perspective of the audience (information consumer). Two theoretical threads have emerged to describe these perspectives: gatewatching and curated flows. 26 Gatewatching The first thread illustrating aggregation and network gatekeeping imagines the information ecosystem from the perspective of the information producers. The dominant theoretical framework from this viewpoint is gatewatching (Bruns, 2003). Gatewatching focuses strongly on news-related information and is the “observation of the output gates of news publications and their sources in order to identify important material as it becomes available” (17). Gatewatching frequently involves information collected from professional journalists; however, this is not always the case, as gatewatching participants collect news from mainstream media organizations and information from other sources (i.e., user-generated content). Bruns in particular (2003) 26 The term curation has been used to describe both perspectives. 29 focuses on websites, especially blogs, where users and authors repost stories from various mainstream media platforms and other sites, sharing information relevant to the tastes of the aggregating site’s audience. Overall, the role of gatewatchers is linking, rather than the production of original content: “Gatewatchers fundamentally publicise news (by pointing to sources) rather than publish it (by compiling an apparently complete report from the available sources)” (Bruns, 2003, 5). Recently, few studies have taken up gatewatching to extend or challenge its theory. A small number of studies use the gatewatching concept as a discursive framework to illustrate news circulation in blogs and social media (Bruns & Highfield, 2012, 2015). In cases where gatekeeping is adapted for theory, it is combined with the concept of curation to emphasize the role of the individual (or group) in the process of collecting and combining disparate pieces of information into a “a story with background and context information provided by the curator” (Stanoevska-Slabeva, Sacco, & Giardina, 2012, 13). Through a content analysis, Stanoevska- Slabeva, Sacco, & Giardina study the Storify social media aggregation platform – where groups of online participants can share links from popular social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, etc. and provide additional commentary on “stories” built around topics – and find that gatewatching occurs for media professionals when collecting and responding to curated content and for amateurs when collecting, publishing, and responding to the curated information. Curated Flows The second thread imagines the information ecosystem from the perspective of the individual information consumer. Viewers of information encounter it in many ways, and one increasingly popular form is through online software platforms that both filter information algorithmically as well as based on explicit personal connections with other individuals (Bennett et al., 2014). One 30 model drawing from this viewpoint is curated flows (Thorson & Wells 2015). This framework stresses that a variety of actors – from mainstream media makers to algorithms – take part in a curation process that makes up an individual’s personal communication network. It draws on the “two-step flow” model of communication, which illustrates that information moves from mainstream media to opinion leaders to individuals, emphasizing the role of personal agency in the consumption of information (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). However, as the authors note, changes in networked society (Castells, 1996) have led to the ideas of hierarchical gatekeeping as collapsing, and therefore the movement of information and presence of opinion leaders is not as direct as previously assumed. In the curated flows concept, information access follows curation logics: “the norms and incentives that guide curation processes—will be more similar within sets of curating actors than across sets” (Thorson & Wells, 2015, 12). The individual engages with channels that deliver information, or the individual searches platforms for information on their own accord, but these flows are “intertwined” and draw from each individual’s “egocentric communication network” (13). For example, on Twitter, individuals will selectively retweet user accounts that they follow within their own ego-network as a curation mechanism to reduce noise within a particular event (Bennett et al., 2014). Similar perspectives, like “way-finding,” focus on individuals’ paths through information ecosystems, through emphasizing the contemporary structure of journalistic institutions in which news producers adapt digital metrics to guide individuals through complex information ecosystems to “appropriate” content (Pearson & Kosicki, 2016). Overall, the concept of curated flows emphasizes the role of connected individuals and individualistic curation as gatekeeping mechanisms. 31 Design & Aggregation To further understand the application of network gatekeeping to aggregation practices online, it is necessary to first discuss how aggregation is implemented in technical design. In an online context, the concept of a platform frequently refers to “online content-hosting intermediaries” and the simultaneous computational and political role that these play for millions of people around the world (Gillespie, 2010). From a systems perspective, platforms run code and utilize the HTTP and TCP-IP protocols that run the internet to connect disparate individuals. They unite participants in shared online spaces and mediate participation through the rules and logic of computational infrastructures. The design of a platform, defined by its code (server, browser, and web technologies), structures what kind of initial interactions can and cannot occur within the system (Lessig, 1999). While platforms “allow code to be written or run,” they also “afford an opportunity to communicate, interact, or sell” (Gillespie, 2010). A technological deterministic approach would argue that code controls all activity within sociotechnical platforms, and while systems involve material artifacts and properties, “systems of production are also social systems” (Leonardi & Barley, 2008). Affordance perspectives help synthesize deterministic approaches by focusing on the relationship between technology and its participants (Fulk & Yuan, 2013). Affordances “[force] the researcher to consider the symbiotic relationship between the action to be taken in the context and the capability of the technology” (Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, & Azad, 2013, 39). A technology affordance mixes with the mediating powers of code to focus on “the mutuality of actor intentions and technology capabilities that provide the potential for a particular action” (39). 32 Visibility Given the increasing amount of information that people interact with every day in the contemporary media landscape, one affordance of online platforms that continues to remain pivotal is visibility. Visibility generally refers to “the means, methods, and opportunities for presentation” (Bregman & Haythornthwaite, 2003). More information means “a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes… it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon, 1971, 40). People make decisions to direct their attention to specific information, or they put their trust in media organizations and platforms to provide the information they should see. Of course, by way of “selection, emphasis, and exclusion” – the idea of gatekeeping previously described – mainstream media and professional journalists are able to craft “media frames” that determine the visibility of information that audiences ultimately see (Gitlin, 1980). The visibility of political movements, for instance, were by and large shaped by the visibility that mass media afforded (if it chose to cover these movements at all). The agenda-setting function of mass media forces attention to certain issues (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006). Without editors or organizations to determine who sees what, visibility becomes a larger concern. However, even online platforms shape the visibility of information and the attention that it garners. This process possibly occurs in more subtle ways, since new media ecosystems have led to the “weakening of the monopoly on public attention” and brought about new avenues for channeling attention (Tufekci, 2013). For instance, “microcelebrity” activists use the affordances of social media platforms to address audiences through online social networks, gaining central positions in discourses about agendas they care about. These actors then compete for attention with traditional media organizations in similar channels and platforms. 33 New media platforms and ecosystems deal in “mediated visibility,” where networked, digital technologies generate “a variety of new interactional situations which have their own distinctive properties” (Thompson, 2005, 34) depending on the technology in question. The differences in design between “news groups, chat rooms, bulletin boards” (34) and other online platforms result in different ways of interacting. Therefore, code, design, and affordances become particularly important for visibility. In online sociotechnical systems, visibility “is tied to the amount of effort people must expend to locate information… if people perceive that information is difficult to access, or they do not know what information exists for them to access, they will likely not seek it out” (Treem & Leonardi, 2012, 150). In cases where the platform provides affordances of visibility to particular pieces of information, a “threat of invisibility” manifests where information contributed to the system might not be made visible (Bucher, 2012). In the past few decades, many varieties of online networked social platforms (“social media”) have emerged. The most popular of these platforms are social network sites (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Ellison & Boyd, 2013), where individuals create explicit links between each other that define how people can access information in the system. Other social media platforms, however, do not include social networks as core features, instead preferring content-based features, like recommendation engines, filtering algorithms, and other technical processes to organize information (Beam, 2014; Meraz, 2012). The design of algorithms within sociotechnical systems not only shapes information access but also the potential for people to actively consume and pass on that information. For instance, on Twitter, the limited attention of a reader combined with the effort to discover and act on a tweet results in users being more likely to retweet information when it is most visible, 34 namely at the top of their feeds (Hodas & Lerman, 2012). Similarly, if it takes more effort to view other users on Twitter, the likelihood is lower that the user will initiate a social connection between the accounts (Zhu & Lerman, 2014). The interface design of a system directly mediates how people act on information to spread it (Hodas & Lerman, 2013). Visibility is an important part of gatekeeping in new media contexts, but technical actors – like algorithms – play a significant but understudied role in gatekeeping. As part of their curated flows concept, Thorson & Wells (2015) detail five types of curating actors, of which “algorithmic filters” is one, which “implicates and overlaps” the other four individual and group actors (9). Algorithms architect attention and define ways of knowing information (Gillespie, 2012, 2014), and they have been shown to influence people’s emotional states (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014). Frequently, people using these online platforms do not know that there are underlying algorithms arranging information in particular ways (Eslami et al., 2015). Some scholars have called for critical investigations into the impact and influence of algorithms, particularly in “black box” situations that don’t provide transparency into the inner workings of these technical systems (Ananny, 2015; Diakopoulos, 2013, 2015; Sandvig, Hamilton, Karahalios, & Langbort, 2014). For aggregation platforms in particular, algorithms play an important role. The main mechanical distinction between social news sites and social network sites is the designed aggregation that “summarizes” the information of the crowd into digestible formats. Members of social news platforms submit links or other information for collective voting, after which algorithms – based on votes, and possibly other internal and external metrics – promote the most popular stories to a home page (Leavitt & Clark, 2014; Lerman, 2007; Meraz, 2012; Sood, Churchill, & Antin, 2012). These filters reorganize the presentation of information within the 35 system, and they define much of what people see from the vast amount of contributions. These factors then also shape gatekeeping, as members of the voting collective with the motivation to share news-related information vie for attention driven by sorting algorithms and as certain roles of participants are defined by access to particular features (for instance, a regular user account cannot delete others’ contributions, whereas a moderator can), also provoking participants to find workarounds and fashion emergent practices in response. Aggregation and News In the context of news and journalism, aggregation is generally seen as a type of newswork that “assemble[s] reliable information” but differs in sourcing, production, and interpretation (C. W. Anderson, 2013b; Coddington, 2015). In other words, it resembles “second order newswork” (C. W. Anderson, 2013a) that adapts prior journalistic efforts. Curation has increased as a practice in the everyday routines of journalists (Bakker, 2014), and while it makes some traditional newsworkers uncomfortable, journalistic aggregation requires audience knowledge, speed, and new skills for rewriting narrative (Agarwal & Barthel, 2013). Notably, Coddington (2015) created a typology of journalistic aggregation that draws from two factors: recreation of content (“the extent to which the aggregator reassembles the information gathered from its sources into a new narrative form or a re-produced account,” 25) and congruence of news judgment (“degree to which it conforms to the prevailing professional consensus judgments of newsworthy topics and central sources, based on both their public statements about their goals and the congruence of their content itself,” 26; see Figure 2 below). Coddington, though, relies on a journalism-centric (rather than an information-centric) definition of aggregation, which focuses on the position of the journalist to frame how platforms might structure the behaviors of news workers. Such an approach avoids other alternatives, such as 36 aggregation of non-journalists, whether or not they collaborate with news workers. Through a network gatekeeping lens, the ideas of reassembly and newsworthiness fluctuate and may occur simultaneously in the same platform or be employed by the same individual. For example, in one case, news reporting might involve multiple contributors, each of whom have differing ideas about using original or linked material or editing according to individual or group decision making. In other words, the framework draws too heavily on the journalistic professionalism of aggregation spaces, which try to define “good work” according to particularized norms and boundaries of journalists (Ananny & Crawford, 2015). This framework also does not attempt to include volunteer participants within sociotechnical systems that conduct similar work as non- professionals. Figure 2. Typological framework of news aggregation (Coddington, 2015, 25). 37 Peer Information Aggregation Throughout the dissertation, I employ the specific term “peer information aggregation” to distinguish the practices of aggregation between ordinary individuals within online platforms from the information aggregation of journalists (which has been a primary focus of aggregation studies around news and information; (C. W. Anderson, 2013b; Coddington, 2015). Peer information aggregation aims to unite the dual perspectives of gatewatching (information producers) and curated flows (information consumers) by focusing on the information practices of individuals and groups, as well as the technological systems, involved in aggregation. Network gatekeeping inherently recognizes that the perspectives of the gatekeepers and gated are at odds with each other and in flux, so peer information aggregation encapsulates the ecosystem of basic practices of information collection and selection while centering on the distinctions of online collectives (or “peers”). Below, I attempt to expand upon this framework of flexible and dynamic gatekeeping and gated roles by exploring aggregation in relation to breaking news situations, drawing in particular from the crisis communication prevalent on social media platforms and the large online collectives of peer production communities. By looking at “breaking news” situations in particular, the high-tempo character of these events brings into focus the complex decisions made at the conflicting points between gatekeepers and gated. Breaking News Natural disasters, man-made crises, celebrity deaths, and other events of national or international interest tend to make up the “breaking news” of the media landscape. Usually such events are unanticipated and unplanned, prompting those who respond – whether citizens or journalists – to react in unusual ways. However, the responses differ depending on the social and organizational 38 contexts of the respondents: nowadays, journalists have structured ways of responding to events (even though the responses might be chaotic at times), and individuals use social networks in extreme ways (resulting in intense spikes of activity). Fast information circulation in developing situations involving increased uncertainty and urgency highlights where network gatekeeping practices hold up and break down, because people who respond to the speed and intensity of information surges by aggregating information (or those who reconstruct the information into news, like journalists) must make impromptu decisions that draw from their personal or professional instincts. Not all events become breaking news, and not all breaking news is equal. However, events that fall under this category highlight the complicated information processes of individuals and groups, providing suitable case studies for understanding changing norms around network gatekeeping. Below, I explore three contexts of breaking news in journalism, crisis communication, and peer production to outline how participants in these categories deal with breaking news but also how they define news events. Defining Events One of the core dimensions of breaking news across all domains is how people conceptualize an event as breaking news or not: in other words, the factors of an event that provoke journalists and citizens to gather information in response to it. Though breaking news is a term used colloquially to refer to emerging information, it is also used within journalistic organizations to denote a specific type of response made in reaction to events. One issue is that breaking news as a genre has become more and more part of the daily news cycle, to the extent that it is used to signify “the ‘newness of news’ regardless of its drama or its significance” (J. Lewis & Cushion, 2009, 306). A prerequisite question therefore revolves around the particular moments that citizens and journalists recognize and identify as “breaking news.” Identification of events as breaking news 39 has changed over time in relation to “their usefulness to an individual who is attempting on a particular occasion to order her or his experience” (Molotch & Lester, 1974, 102). Breaking news as a term encompasses different temporal factors of events. Unlike “managed news,” where journalists and media organizations respond to planned events, “unmanaged news” events draw from spontaneity (Livingston & Bennett, 2003). And these types have different effects on how journalists and citizens respond to them. The “pseudo-events” of managed news appeal to journalists because they can be easily managed and coordinated by reporters (Boorstin, 1961). However, some events cause interruptions to routine, where “regular broadcasting is suspected” (Dayan & Katz, 1994). “Event-based news” that emerges in spontaneous ways means that “officials and institutions often respond to the news agenda rather than set it” (Lawrence, 2000, 9). One problem for scholars and technology designers is to understand the impact that bursts of information have on the uses of technology platforms and how traditional gatekeepers respond to these information flows generated in a short period (Diao, Jiang, Zhu, & Lim, 2012). Mainstream media organizations remain strong nodes in reacting to developing events, creating “breaking news” stories that others depend upon for information. While they might not necessarily be the first to report on events, they remain pivotal to bringing global attention to particular events and stories (Gallé, Renders, & Karstens, 2013). As citizens increasingly become sources for emerging information from developing events, their changes in decision-making, responsive actions, and group social norms for information broadcast and circulation may point to shifts in how gatekeeping practices shape these information flows. Further, as aggregation continues to play an important role in the collection and filtering of massive amounts of information for keen audiences, we need to understand how the mixing of regular people and 40 professional news reporters, and social media and mainstream media channels, impacts the information dynamics of developing events, or what many colloquially refer to as breaking news situations. In the research literature, there are three primary models of breaking news, from journalism, crisis communication, and online peer production. Throughout each of these models, there exist pieces of participatory information, or “citizen journalism,” practices (Bruns & Highfield, 2012). The inclusion of breaking news as a frame for this dissertation is not so much to refine a definition of breaking news so much as to identify attributes of breaking news situations – urgency of information needs, uncertainty of information quality, speed of information bursts, etc. – that impact the organizational production of aggregated news content. Below, I step through each of the models of breaking news to demonstrate how each of these conceptualizations of news events and responses to them sit alongside each other – and yet depend on each other too – and conclude with a synthesis of how these attributes apply to aggregation and network gatekeeping. Breaking News in Journalism The first model of breaking news draws from the sociology of journalism to focus on how major, unexpected events impact the professional construction of news stories and news products. Additionally, this model emphasizes how breaking news situations influence professional journalistic practices resulting in a relaxation of professional norms around sourcing, verification, and other processes because of the practical constraints of urgency and the expectation of immediacy. The focus of the first model is the production of the traditional, professional news product. Gans (1980) defines news as “information which is transmitted from sources to 41 audiences, with journalists… summarizing, refining, and altering what becomes available to them from sources in order to make the information suitable for their audiences” (80). In breaking news situations, though, these routine processes can shift, relax, or even break down. News is “fundamentally temporal,” but when unscheduled events occur, journalists and scholars refer to these moments as “breaking news” (Hansen, Ward, Conners, & Neuzil, 1994) because the products produced in these situations require different modes of work (even though the processes themselves are similar, if not the same). Breaking news – which journalists view as “non-routine” – differs from everyday news reporting because journalists acknowledge the disruption it introduces, provide more attention to these stories, and supply more resources to reporting on them (Berkowitz, 1992). In fact, as journalistic organizations have learned to respond to developing events, this type of news reporting has become a genre in and of itself. Reporters use the same techniques as ordinary news; however, constraints on time and resources for reporting that is time sensitive (such as during developing events) result in systematic changes to journalists’ newswork (such as “less diversity and cross-checking”; Reich & Godler, 2014). Even the narrative structure in storytelling formats when reporting on developing events changes, because “journalists apply different news values and storytelling techniques in breaking news situations,” such as the inclusion of hints toward shared social values when framing a story (LaPoe & Reynolds, 2013). Journalists’ responses to news, for instance, have changed over time. Before the internet gained widespread use, there appeared to be a shift from “event-centered” reporting (where basic information about an event was provided) to “interpretive” or “analysis-centered” reporting (where journalists provided contextual explanations for audiences; Barnhurst & Mutz, 1997). Recently, reporting has primarily evolved to reflect information that is more sensational, 42 dramatic, and unexpected (Strömbäck et al., 2012). The “pressure of temporality,” where immediacy of broadcasting new information becomes preferred over analysis of that information, also impacts how news organizations choose and report on some events over others (Le Cam & Domingo, 2015). In response to developing events, organizations have institutionalized the “breaking news” genre in order to better respond. Immediacy and responsiveness to a developing event remain core characteristics of breaking news stories: these events command attention while challenging journalists’ professional, familiar rhythms (Berkowitz, 1992; Reynolds & Barnett, 2003; Tuchman, 1978). Liveness in news reporting has increased, though much live reporting appears to occur “with no apparent journalistic justification” (Tuggle & Huffman, 2001), because there is nothing added to the coverage that illuminates most live settings in news reports (and hence it could merely be pre-recorded rather than occurring “at the scene”). Early technology also impacted the way that journalists dealt with breaking news situations. While technology helped increase the ease and speed with which journalists could identify sources, reporters still tended to rely on the same types and number of official sources (Hansen et al., 1994, 3). Alongside the popularization of the internet, the routines and rhythms of journalism shifted further. Immediacy became “an overarching, defining feature of online journalism” (Usher, 2014a, 11) because journalists felt pressured to report, provoked by the cycle between the expectations of audiences and news organizations as both respond to the evolving contemporary media consumer landscape (Coddington, 2015, 47). Usher (2014) more recently writes: In fact, [online newswork] operated according to an entirely different rhythm. Production for the web was a frenetic activity, often with little clear strategy about how, when, and why stories should be posted. Online news production was largely a response to the perceived pressure of immediacy, defined as ASAP, constant updates for online 43 journalism — and in parallel, immediacy emerged as a value that structured and ordered newswork and gave journalists a particular vision of their role as professionals. In other words, immediacy became integrated into the routines of some online journalists, like those at the New York Times, that occupy a large share of news attention. To complicate the daily routine of journalism, the speed and scale of information online that journalists must source from and verify continues to increase the pressure of immediacy. Thousands or millions of participants on social media platforms produce an exponential amount of messages only minutes, or even seconds, after an event occurs (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010). In response to the fast deluge of many bits of information, journalists relax their professional norms, though at the expense of dependable sourcing (e.g., choosing the sources easiest to access) and reliable verification (e.g., not confirming leads through alternate sources; Hermida, 2013; Phillips, 2010). In fact, online breaking new reports frequently are not “finalized”; instead, they are continuously updated through the period of a day, with 60% having edits occur within the first 2 hours (Saltzis, 2012). Journalists have also attempted to adapt to developing events with experimental forms of their own, such as live blogging (Thurman & Newman, 2014). Breaking news for journalism revolves around developing events and produces “non- routine” reporting situations, which news organizations have learned to respond to over the years. However, immediacy and the scale of information remain primary concerns for professionals, in terms of whether or not they should 1) be involved in these spaces as well as 2) draw from these spaces for professional work. These dimensions of breaking news thus become key facets for participants who aggregate the produced news from journalists’ responding to developing events. The crisis communication literature presents another perspective on breaking news dynamics that centers its analysis on these information surges. 44 Breaking News in Crisis Communication The second model of breaking news draws from crisis communication and “citizen journalism,” combining research literature from journalism studies and information science. It emphasizes the role of participants in massive and diverse online networks in the production and circulation of vast amounts of information quickly after an unanticipated event. The involvement of citizens in news production has been described with many terms, such as participatory journalism or crowdsourcing, that are inconsistent and ambiguous. Comparisons of similar news systems have been difficult as a result (Scott, Millard, & Leonard, 2015). Crisis informatics examines the ecosystem of information around disaster events, where messages from both professionals and citizens circulate rapidly across vast networks of connected individuals. The rapid communication of information across a network tends to be led by central, well-connected hubs, though these networks have far-reaching effects once a particular message is seeded into the web. Frequently, these networks contain a mix of: individual media professionals (i.e., journalists) and experts in a range of fields (e.g., police); media institutions represented by distinct user accounts that act as broadcasting channels (e.g., CNN); and ordinary citizens – “citizen journalists” who may find themselves close to or even involved in the unfolding events (Goode, 2009; Wall, 2015). Further, these networks include a combination of information and professional news products, as well as the latter category reshaped into other types of information like reconstituted headlines. Information within crisis communication involves the variety of communication – such as messages and media, but also including rumors and misinformation – that emerge after a crisis event, such as natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes), man-made warfare (e.g., shootings), etc. (Arif et al., 2016). A small but dedicated subset of the possible participants in social media systems 45 volunteer by directing information to specific audiences or calling on individuals in their networks to act, while also sifting through misinformation and attempting corrections (Starbird & Palen, 2012). 27 Sometimes even temporary, informal organizations emerge, as communities “improvise response under uncertain and dynamic conditions” (Leysia Palen & Liu, 2007, 733). However, on occasion, officials see these volunteers – which usually act on the periphery of, rather than in concert with, professionals (Perng et al., 2012) – as problematic, “whose competencies and intentions are difficult to assess” (Pipek, Liu, & Kerne, 2014, 344). Speed and volume remain a concern in crisis communication. Surges in participation during crisis events lead to a multiplication of information shared, as the public both shares and recirculates information while seeking support via these connected networks (Heverin & Zach, 2010; L. Palen, Vieweg, Liu, & Hughes, 2009; Perng et al., 2012; Qu, Huang, Zhang, & Zhang, 2011; Qu, Wu, & Wang, 2009). While there are some examples of crisis communication that break news about unexpected events faster than traditional journalism (Hu et al., 2012), others have shown that platforms like Twitter actually do not eclipse the speed of mainstream media (Petrovic et al., 2013). However, in large networks of participants such as those on social media platforms, noise – and filtering that noise to find relevant information – also remains a significant problem (K. Lee, Caverlee, Kamath, & Cheng, 2012). Social network sites like Twitter have been tested for their usefulness as information alert systems (Kwak et al., 2010). Particular types of content demonstrate a higher likelihood of being recirculated throughout a social network during a crisis situation, whether generally news-related 27 It should be noted that another element of crisis informatics involves communication practices led by emergency professionals, though it is outside the scope of this dissertation. Older, linear models for disseminating crucial information during emergencies are considered outdated even for these participants because of the connectedness and speed of new media (Leysia Palen & Liu, 2007). 46 or specific lexical or multimedia attributes of messages (Bandari, Asur, & Huberman, 2012; Sutton et al., 2015). Rumors in particular are shown to move more quickly during crisis events (Zeng, Starbird, & Spiro, 2016). At its core, and increasingly, crisis communication involves participatory “citizen journalism” practices, where citizens contribute messages and media to shared information spaces (Gillmor, 2004). While many user-generated content platforms provide the affordance of quick communication across vast, connected networks, some stand out. For instance, the use of Twitter to report on unfolding events has provided “live coverage without any reporters on the ground, by simply newsgathering user-generated content available online” (Bruno, 2011, 8). Bloggers also collect information in similar ways. Coincidentally, they do similar interpretive work as journalists – working within similar perceptions of professionalism that structure how they choose stories, find sources, and verify information – when reporting on developing events. Some bloggers even feel they should become recognized as part of the local journalistic community and be included as contributors and key sources (Robinson & DeShano, 2011). Intersections of Journalism and Crisis Communication Professional journalists have attempted to adapt so-called “citizen journalism” participants into their own professional processes, though with difficulty (and sometimes resistance). It is important to reiterate that the information of crisis communication remains distinct from professional news, because the latter is the product of journalists as they process information into news stories, while the former usually begins as original information (textual, visual, and auditory media). Additionally, many journalists see problems – like “editing issues, liability problems… the whole practice would be degrading,” as one interviewed journalist put it – with 47 engaging with citizens and incorporating these interactions into their news products (S. C. Lewis, Kaufhold, & Lasorsa, 2010, 9). However, in recent years, professional journalists have more and more interacted with these types of messages and platforms. Citizens frequently break stories that professional journalists draw from and follow up upon later (Guo, 2014). Occasionally, journalists have organized their own work alongside efforts of citizens to share in the collection and evaluation of information during crises (Dailey & Starbird, 2014). Still, few journalists seem to solicit information from social network sites on a consistent basis (Hedman & Djerf-Pierre, 2013). Some journalists do operate in the opposite direction, where they break news for their organization directly on Twitter, though often their engagement with the platform revolves around opinion and commentary instead of direct sourcing and reporting (Cozma & Chen, 2013; Sheffer & Schultz, 2010). Some journalists use online social media platforms for sourcing and verification, particularly in near-real time (Broersma & Graham, 2013; Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012). For those reporters engaging in sourcing and verification on social platforms, they still engage in lax professional norms or are willing to at least bend established rules (Hermida, Lewis, & Zamith, 2014). For instance, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, many mainstream media outlets did not consistently verify information taken from social media before publishing it to their readers (Bruno, 2011). Because of the difficulty of dealing with the speed and volume of information on connected social platforms, news organizations have developed standards, institutional policies, and even technologies to aid in these practices. For instance, some reporters have adopted policies for uses of links and hashtags to aid in the discoverability of their broadcast messages (Vis, 2013). 48 Breaking News in Online Peer Production Like crisis communication, a third model of breaking news draws on the production of potentially thousands of individuals within shared online spaces to coordinate information in unplanned situations: online peer production. Contrastingly, the model of peer production relies on coordinated activities between members of online communities, spaces that exhibit their own social norms (with defined roles and shared goals around information collection and organization). Peer production occupies the intersection of crisis communication and journalism in responding to particular events: participants are triggered by both information surges as well as leads from news organizations. In cases of developing events, members of these online collectives assemble into temporary, high-tempo organizations where information is collected and vetted by the community, then turned into a collaborative information product. In some ways, these organizational forms resemble small teams of professionals (and for news, journalists in particular). They even adopt similar ways of vetting information compared to those of journalists, though the end goals of these groups are distinctly different. Sometimes these collectives are explicitly defined by information that pertains to news, though frequently they are larger online communities or collaborative projects that have general goals (e.g., Wikipedia), within which breaking news emerges as one focal point for a subset of individuals. Whether centered on news or not, peer production communities are explicitly defined by the contributions of like-minded individuals. Commons-based peer production (Benkler, 2006; Benkler, Shaw, & Hill, 2015) represents a range of collaborative projects where thousands of people – usually online – contribute toward a shared goal shared, usually by collecting, parsing, editing – and, of course, contesting – information to form a collective product. The archetypical example of successful commons-based peer production is Wikipedia, wherein thousands of 49 contributors and editors collect, debate, and publish information into encyclopedia articles about various topics (Reagle, 2012). Peer production can take other forms with other goals: for instance, people collaborate on storytelling projects on the collaborative platform, Everything2 (Lampe, Wash, Velasquez, & Ozkaya, 2010); people share information about science and technology developments on the collaborative website, Slashdot (Poor, 2006); or people collaborate on scientific advancements on the global citizen science project, GalaxyZoo (Madison, 2014). Most peer production communities do not work within the confines of professional norms or institutions but develop their own. Though some members may be experts in a given field or topic of relevance to the product, many individuals are amateurs and participate as volunteers (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006; Bruns, 2008). Even though many projects rely on volunteer contributions, the emergent norms and rules defined by community members (for example, the Neutral Point of View [NPOV] policy) tend to produce quality information products (Kittur & Kraut, 2008). Coordination, Collective Action, & Design Peer production draws on collective action: the practices of aligning people with common interests to work toward shared goals. Early collective action theories focused on formal organizations and the practices of organizing participants and coordinating actions, particularly in light of “free riding” (Olson, 2003). In new media contexts, informal organizations are more frequent and common; instead, contemporary approaches to collective action draw on “organization-less organizing,” where self-organizing groups of participants work together outside of institutions (Bimber, Flanagin, Andrew J., & Stohl, 2012). The lack of hierarchical structures in these groups has allowed distributed collective action to thrive in contexts like 50 Wikipedia and open source software, because people can negotiate work within large projects in distributed ways (Benkler, 2006; von Hippel & von Krogh, 2003; Von Krogh, 2002). Still, research shows that some traditional issues of collective action emerge from sustained peer production, notably how “small groups of early members consolidate and exercise a monopoly of power” (A. Shaw & Hill, 2014). While some theories have attempted to be technology agnostic (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2005), others – particularly within the discipline of human-computer interaction (Grudin, 1994, 2012) – have embraced technology as a strong mediating factor. Recent models of coordinated action have extended prior taxonomies of coordination that draw on the design of technological systems in order to analyze practices (A. Shaw et al., 2014). Lee and Paine (2015) argue that new ways of understanding coordination in sociotechnical systems are necessary, because coordination remains complicated: Coordinated action can still be conceived of as people working together toward a shared goal. But shared goals can be very diffuse and ill-defined and we also see that “working together” may sometimes feel more like a series of fleeting microblog exchanges or people working rather separately on different systems that still need to interoperate with a larger, sprawling infrastructure. (11) They name seven dimensions of technology use – synchronous (or asynchronous) work, physical distance, scale, range of communities of practice (that members belong to), routineness (or emergence) of behaviors, intended permanence (or temporariness) of the action, and turnover of membership – that articulate ways to reconsider the context of coordination activities. Peer Production & News As explained above, when centered around news topics, commons-based peer production communities can take two primary forms: collectives oriented specifically toward news, or larger 51 communities within which a subset of participants focus on news topics. 28 The “wiki news” model represents peers who collect and vet news via similar coordination practices – and even using the same software technologies – as Wikipedia (Bruns, 2006; Hill, 2007; McIntosh, 2008). Because of the specific focus on news, the norms of the community are structured in detail around these practices, orienting potential participants toward a particular set of behaviors. These communities adapt information from other sources to produce individual news stories. Of course, these “news” products conflict with the traditional journalistic concept of a “news story.” While the community defines rules around “objectivity” (Tran, 2009), policies like NPOV complicate the success of these projects because politics – or the values that newsworkers embed into their work – are an inherent part of news reporting (Hill, 2007; McIntosh, 2008). The baseline difference from professional news is that these peer producers “are… not primarily charged with an obligation to report objectively and impartially, or to work to a set amount of column inches or airtime, but rather with the task of evaluating what is ‘reliable’ information in all the topical fields they cover” (Bruns, 2003, 4). These volunteers rework professional news products back into non-news information. Alternatively, commons-based peer production communities that focus on more general information activities may provide more robust technical – and social – infrastructure, as well as larger potential audiences. However, the norms of the larger peer community may be less able to accommodate specific emergent practices, e.g., around “news reporting,” and therefore may lead to larger complications amongst members. For example, within Wikipedia, while the shared goals of the community are to curate information to produce encyclopedia articles, a smaller 28 A third area driven by “crowdsourcing” exists (Aitamurto, 2015; Dailey & Starbird, 2014) though it focuses more on participation guided by professional journalists, and therefore it is outside the scope of this dissertation. 52 collective of participants focus on the creation of articles for developing news events. Similarly, collaborative news aggregation websites like Slashdot (Chan, 2002) or Digg (Goode, 2009) provide a technical system and social environment for participants to collaborate as producers, sources, and editors on the creation of news-related information, working together within the constraints of the platform and participant collective to define what is newsworthy. In general, these platforms may facilitate the creation of information aggregation practices around breaking news events, but the final product of these collaborations may not resemble what traditional journalism considers news stories. Just as with journalism and crisis communication, developing events introduce complexity to peer news collaborations. Due to the nature of large collectives working within platforms, peer groups use both explicit coordination (“direct communication and verbal planning”) and implicit coordination (“unspoken expectations and shared mental models”) techniques, to varying levels of success (Kittur & Kraut, 2008). Because of the speed of editing, editors on “breaking news” articles on Wikipedia form distinctly different collaborations than when working on non-breaking news articles (Keegan, Gergle, & Contractor, 2012b, 2013). However, breaking news articles still result in high quality products, even though it is very difficult to coordinate between editors. Still, because of the urgency, speed, and complexity that developing events present to editors, participants will seek (or avoid) specific articles edited by particular people (for instance, people who have expertise in quickly updating information about hurricanes; Keegan, Gergle, & Contractor, 2012a). These findings reflect the difficulty of these collaborations, but they also “reaffirm the importance of understanding the interdependence between task demands and coordination methods” (8). 53 Intersections of Peer Production, Journalism, and Crisis Communication The peer production of news sits in between the affordances and constraints of professional journalism and networked crisis communication. Though journalists’ professional uses of websites like Wikipedia might be tenuous (in part due to journalists’ distrust of its information; (D. Shaw, 2008), the peer production model does offer the benefit of completing complex tasks by distributing the work across many individual efforts. In the past decade, a number of experimental news projects have emerged that adapt information from social media platforms into participatory, peer production-like journalistic enterprises. Most notably is an emergent area of “social news gathering,” a term coined by Andy Carvin, formerly of NPR, who used Twitter to collect and broadcast information during the Arab Spring political uprisings (Hermida et al., 2014). More recently, Andy Carvin has focused his work on social news gathering in a news start-up, Reportedly, 29 which employs a number of journalists and draws from large networks of volunteers on social media platforms to aggregate information about global news events (Ingram, 2014). A number of news apps have also attempted to fill perceived gaps in the news industry with peer news aggregation, like Storify (Ananny & Crawford, 2015). Network Gatekeeping as a Lens for Peer Information Aggregation Aggregation in response to developing events draws from all three models of information production and circulation detailed above: it uses the social norms of a peer production community to vet large networks of information in addition to professional, verified news sources. As a set of practices, aggregation – like journalism – also becomes complicated by crisis 29 https://reported.ly/ 54 situations. The uncertainty of breaking news situations requires participants in peer aggregation collaborations to be more cognizant of vetting information in journalistic ways within the bounds of the social norms of the platform’s community. The consequences of proper information evaluation are more difficult to pinpoint in peer information aggregation contexts, though as audiences increasingly rely on social media platforms for their news, 30 more research will be required to understand the lasting impact of non-journalists’ work on audience acquisition and the comprehension of information. Aggregation “involves exercising rapid-fire discernment regarding a constant flow of information, reading and writing quickly, and doing so in an environment that is often unstable and chaotic” (Coddington, 2015, 48). The complicated gatekeeping ecosystem of aggregation platforms presents two hurdles for aggregation during developing events: participants are tasked with 1) rapid collection, coordination, and evaluation of uncertain information from online networks and professional news organizations, within 2) the affordances and constraints of a particular sociotechnical system’s design, norms, and social relationships. The expectations in producing and circulating information during crisis situations where urgency remains high shape how, why, and by whom this work is done. In this dissertation, I examine the potentials and controls of a dynamic, network gatekeeping environment in order to illustrate how volunteers coordinate to evaluate and aggregate information during developing events for a potential audience of millions. Focusing four chapters around the tenets of network gatekeeping, this dissertation demonstrates how reddit’s approach to breaking news situations allows us to extend network gatekeeping’s salience – political power, information production, relationships, and alternatives – to account for the 30 http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/ 55 fluctuating roles, evolving design, and flexible collaborations present within the reddit ecosystem. In the following chapters, I ask: 1. Who are the participants that do peer information aggregation work, and what are their motivations, prior experience, and values? 2. What are the practices of peer information aggregation? How do they make decisions to conduct this type of high-tempo news work? 3. How do participants collaborate and coordinate during peer information aggregation? 4. What conflicts arise between human and technological actors in peer information aggregation? 56 Ch. 3: Data & Method In this dissertation, I use one social news site, reddit.com, as a case study to examine network gatekeeping practices in the aggregation of information during developing events. I use a combination of ethnographic interviews and participant observation with a statistical analysis of historical reddit data. Below, I first provide context of reddit.com as the platform and community of interest for these studies, and then I illustrate details behind the chosen data and methods. Reddit, a “Social News Site” Reddit is a “social news” platform 31 that allows people to contribute links to external websites that other users vote on; the links with the highest votes are then shown at the top of the home page. Reddit presents an intriguing field site for two primary reasons. First, reddit exists as a platform for multiple, linked topical discussion forums (Meraz, 2012), as well as a network for shared identity as a diverse online community (Papacharissi, 2010). While in the past few years, researchers have begun to look into reddit as a site of study, many scholars continue to depend on major platforms like Facebook and especially Twitter (Tufekci, 2014). And second, reddit is a general use website, unlike social network sites (Ellison & Boyd, 2013), sites dedicated to specific media (like videos on YouTube; Burgess & Green, 2009), or niche content (e.g., MetaFilter; Silva, Goel, & Mousavidin, 2009). As Massanari argues, reddit is “a unique, boundary-spanning platform that elicits new questions about the nature of participatory culture and community in the age of social networking” (A. L. Massanari, 2015, 7). Reddit boasts a tagline of “the front page of the internet,” emphasizing its role as a central hub through which audiences can find content that they might be interested in from all 31 Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian and launched publicly in early 2006. The platform was quickly acquired by Condé Nast Publications in late 2006. 57 parts of the Web. Reddit’s popularity since 2006 has skyrocketed: at the time of writing, it ranks in the Top 10 most-visited sites in the United States and in the Top 50 most-visited sites globally. 32 According to the site’s official blog, in 2015, reddit witnessed 73.15 million submissions, 725.85 million comments, 6.89 billion upvotes, and 82.54 billion pageviews. 33 While millions of users have registered individual accounts (and sometimes multiples; Leavitt, 2015) on the platform, many more merely browse the front page as viewers. In a sense, the promotion of content to the home page combined with the popularity of the platform recreates a broadcast model of information, where many people use the site to get news and information on a day-to-day basis. As one of many social news platforms, reddit is notable because of its current popularity. The first notable social news sites, Slashdot and Fark, appeared in the late 1990s, drawn out of geek-centric online communities, forums, and networks, and cultivated small, niche communities. Since then, similar sites like Digg and especially reddit have surpassed them in traffic and, while they originated in the same kinds of communities, eventually gained widespread popularity around the world. Subreddits Reddit is distinct when compared to other social news platforms because it is composed of a network of subcommunities called subreddits. These subreddits are distinct message boards curated around particular topics, such as /r/pics for sharing pictures or /r/funny for posting jokes. Contributions – links or text posts – are submitted to one specific subreddit, where they are aggregated with other contributions. Anyone can visit a subreddit at its distinct URL (i.e., 32 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com 33 http://www.redditblog.com/2015/12/reddit-in-2015.html 58 http://reddit.com/r/<subreddit>), and each subreddit manages its own members, moderators, and – notably – distinct rules and social norms for participation. Reddit as a platform aggregates the contributions of its many subreddits: it is founded on the idea of a network of subcommunities, where users post across a variety of subreddits, navigating the unique social norms of each forum. Without a user account, a viewer of reddit.com will see a select network of subreddits (dubbed the “default” list 34 ) aggregated together on the “front page.” When someone creates a user account and visits the front page, they will see the same “default” subreddits and their respective contributions. However, they can then subscribe to new subreddits (or unsubscribe from the default set); the platform then aggregates the contributions of these new subreddits into the user account’s list of subscribed communities. Anyone with a registered account can also create a new subreddit (given two prerequisites related to account age and karma [explained below] 35 ), for which they are made the subcommunity’s first moderator. However, one of the barriers for new participants is discovering the variety of subreddits that exist. Subreddits that are not included in the default set must recruit users through advertising or word of mouth or rely on serendipity; therefore, newer subreddits may take some time to grow a committed collective of contributors. 34 For a current list of default subreddits, see https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults; the most recent update demonstrates default settings for multiple countries: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/3hu24f/list_of_default_subreddits_20150821_multiple/ 35 https://www.reddit.com/r/help/wiki/faq#wiki_how_do_i_create_a_subreddit.3F 59 Contributions There are three primary ways to contribute on reddit: post a submission, post a comment, or vote on a submission or comment. There are also secondary and recently-developed ways to communicate within reddit’s ecosystem, namely through private messages and live threads. Links & “Self” (Text) Posts A user account may contribute two types of submissions: links (URLs) or text posts (known as “self” posts). A link submission requires a user-generated title and URL (though the title can be auto-generated), while a self post requires a title and textual content. Contributors may submit any valid URL (including links internally to other pages within reddit) to the reddit platform. However, starting in mid-2012, administrators have created site- wide bans on some external URLs due to spamming, malicious intent, or cheating of reddit’s community rules. 36 It is important to note that any URL submitted to a subreddit goes through an automated match detection process, to see if the particular hyperlink already exists within the subreddit. If it has already been posted, the contributor is forwarded immediately to the existing page created within the subreddit. However, anyone can cross-post the same URL to other, different subreddits. Reddit also provides the option to contribute text posts, which allow the submitter to include any textual information (including URLs) up to 10,000 characters. These posts are voted and commented upon in the same way as URL submissions. 36 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/umx99/reddit_change_domains_can_be_blocked_from_being/ 60 Comments Reddit’s platform allows contributors to submit comments on any type of post. Reddit also offers a hierarchical commenting system, where child comments of parent comments are tabbed to the right to visually depict the hierarchical relationship. When a participant comments on a post or comment, reddit’s system automatically sends the original poster or commenter a private message (explained below) with the responding comment. Private Messages Reddit allows individuals to send private messages to each other. One user account may message another directly without any pre-existing reciprocal relationships. Each account also highlights, at the top of the platform’s page, an envelope icon that alerts the user by turning orange when a message has been received. 37 Private messages are also used as alerts to other types of actions in the system. When a contributor submits a post or comment and that submission is then replied to with additional comments, each of those comments appears as a private message in the contributor’s inbox. Reddit also implemented a feature that allows a participant to append a link to a specific username in a comment (e.g., “Hello, /u/alexleavitt”), which then sends a private message to the corresponding user account. Live Threads Relevant to this dissertation, there is one additional feature that has been adopted by many reddit users: the “live thread,” which reddit revealed in 2014. 38 The live thread is a tweak to the reddit contribution flow to allow the easier editing of posts in realtime. Essentially, a reddit live thread 37 https://www.reddit.com/wiki/messaging 38 http://www.redditblog.com/2014/07/announcing-reddit-live.html 61 is an optimized live blog feature. Users had attempted to edit self posts and comments multiple times in a short period; because reddit’s backend system was not architected efficiently for this purpose, the administrators tested and released a new feature specifically for quickly updating a post. A new live thread can be created by any user account at https://www.reddit.com/live, which submits a new link with comments to the /r/live subreddit. With a distinct URL, the user account that created the live thread can quickly post, edit, and delete updates, and each of these contributions displays embedded metadata from other websites smoothly (for example, linking to a Twitter message displays a nicely-formatted embedded tweet, along with any included images or videos). However, only approved accounts can contribute to the live thread. The original user also becomes the first moderator for the live thread and can promote other users to be moderators with specific privileges (e.g., deleting others’ contributions). Each contribution to the live thread appears in chronological order, and registered accounts cannot vote on these submissions like ordinary reddit posts (but the submission for the live thread linked in /r/live can be voted and commented upon). Finally, an administrator can “sticky” a live thread to the top of reddit’s front page, so that many viewers can easily find new live threads (this is uncommon, though it has occurred recently with major news events, like the Paris attacks in late 2015). Votes As a social news site, one of reddit’s most notable features is its voting system. For each post contributed to a subreddit, a user account may vote the submission up (“upvote”) or down (“downvote”). Each new submission starts with one upvote (from the contributing user). Every user account may vote once on each submission. In the community rules wiki, the administrators write, “As a general rule, vote up what you liked (and want to see more of) and vote down what you disliked (and don't want to see similar things in the future) -- there's really not much else to 62 it.” 39 They explicitly explain that voting should be used for marking relevance and not agreement (e.g., “downvotes should be used for irrelevant comments, not ideas you disagree with”). 40 Whether or not the thousands of voters on reddit abide by these suggestions is a topic of widespread debate within the reddit community. The number of up- and downvotes sum to a score, which is used for ranking submissions against each other within a subreddit (and across subreddits, on a user’s front page). However, reddit does implement a “vote fuzzing” algorithm which changes the actual score slightly as an anti-spam technique referred to as “soft capping.” 41 42 The function of voting on content in social news sites has wide-ranging implications on the community and its visible content. First, voting relies on user actions. Lerman & Hogg (2010) demonstrate how it is possible to predict popular content based on the early voting behaviors of users. However, relative actions of individuals also matter: for instance, only a small fraction of users on Digg contribute content, and it is possible for a small, dense network of individuals to conspire and promote each other’s contributions (Lerman, 2007). Further, social relationships can impact voting: in addition to a dominant majority controlling the interests of the larger group, users tend to like stories submitted by friends rather than strangers, and this preference can lead to a “tyranny of the minority” in social news site platforms (Lerman, 2006). Connections between individuals also matter. For example, Lerman & Galstyan (2008) suggest that how content spreads across users’ relative networks implicates the success of that 39 https://www.reddit.com/wiki/voting 40 https://www.reddit.com/wiki/voting 41 https://www.reddit.com/r/help/wiki/faq#wiki_why_do_the_number_of_votes_change_when_you_reload_a_page.3F 42 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/29j5uh/reddit_still_artificially_introduces_downvotes_on/cilw jgn?context=2 63 content: information that spreads beyond ego networks tends to do much better overall. Also, Lerman & Ghosh (2010) demonstrate that network structure greatly impacts the flow of information. The social network structure interacts with interface design of information: Hogg & Lerman (2012) show that placement of information, especially content contributed by friends, greatly impacts voting behaviors, as well as the ultimate ranking of the contributed content. Generally, too, there is a feedback loop on the future participation of users. For instance, Cheng, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, & Leskovec (2014) illustrate that negative feedback through voting leads to significant behavioral changes (which are ultimately detrimental to the community). Also, the converse holds true: as Muchnik, Aral, & Taylor (2013) found, negative- voted user contributions led to the individual correcting behavior, while positive voting increased the likelihood of further positive votes, demonstrating the consequences of herding. Voting may affect behavior in different ways, but the important takeaway is the impact that crowd participant might have on an individual’s choices. Ranking & Filtering Algorithms Unlike some sociotechnical systems that rely on social relations (Facebook) or temporality (Twitter) to organize information, social news sites rely on crowd voting to arrange content (Meraz, 2012). Reddit employs filtering algorithms to rank and order content posted to subreddits. These filtering algorithms fall within the broader category of recommender systems (Resnick & Varian, 1997), specifically collaborative filtering systems that aggregate the contributions of many in order to “benefit from each other’s experiences” (Terveen & Hill, 2001). Reddit provides a variety of ranking algorithms for its viewers, such as “top” (ordering the highest-voted submissions to the top of the page), “hot” (ordering the highest-voted 64 submissions, factoring in time, to the top of the page), and others like “new,” “rising,” and “controversial.” Notably, in 2009, administrators implemented a “best” ranking for comments, which – as the now-default way to sort comments – attempts to improve the quality of comments appearing at the top of the comment hierarchy for any particular post. 43 Participants may still switch between ranking algorithms if they choose, in order to explore the stories within a subreddit (or their front page) in different ways. While reddit’s platform is open-source, 44 and while the frameworks for each of the ranking algorithms are accessible, 45 it is difficult to determine exactly how each of the ranking algorithms works (again, due to anti-spam techniques). Some individuals have explained the basic tenets behind the algorithms; for example, Salihefendic (2015) illustrates how time factors into the “hot” algorithm, but he then explains how the “best” algorithm for comments avoids the influence of time (namely, the problem that earlier comments that receive many upvotes are more likely to be upvoted further due to visibility). While crowd-based voting shapes the possible ranks of submissions on reddit, the filtering algorithms structure the order, the visibility, and therefore the attention that these contributions receive. Because the front page only includes 25 positions, and for many people this page aggregates the submissions from multiple subreddits, there is only enough space to include a few (or even one) submission from each subcommunity. Visibility therefore becomes valuable in this system, and the value of submissions is therefore regulated by the number of votes they get from the wider reddit collective. While scholars have determined that information diffusion can occur very quickly within social news site frameworks (e.g., Lerman & Ghosh, 43 http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html 44 https://github.com/reddit/reddit 45 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx 65 2010), due to the visibility that these sociotechnical systems can produce for particular pieces of information, reddit’s filtering algorithms still can limit the potential of information to spread, if a particular, important submission does not reach a threshold for overcoming the positions of prior contributions (for instance, if a news crisis is not voted highly or quickly enough compared to a prior post, it may not reach a position on the first page of users’ personal feeds). While the algorithms have been slightly changed throughout reddit’s history, in August 2015, the reddit administrators changed the algorithm to allow for a higher “soft cap” of submissions’ scores, leading to “unintended effects” that kept prior popular posts at the top of the ranking for a longer period, thus preventing newer posts from taking over. 46 While the administrators rolled back the changes, a bout of confusion swept through many of reddit’s communities. Karma When a contributor posts a link submission or comment, the total score received by the submission (total upvotes) is added to the individual’s total “karma” points, which are tracked (as link karma and comment karma, respectively) for every user account and displayed on their user profile page. Many people on reddit use karma as a measure of reputation, and reddit’s system also accounts for karma as a gating mechanism (e.g., as previously stated, a user account must have a certain amount of karma to create a subreddit). Users who contribute self posts do not have the score of these submissions added to their personal karma scores. 46 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_change_the_scores_of_extremelypopular/ 66 User Profiles Every registered user account has a profile page that displays each of the following items: the username; time of account creation; achieved badges (awarded for a variety of actions on the site); links and comment karma scores; and notably, post and comment scores. It is not uncommon for reddit community members to use these profiles page to check other participants’ posting histories and karma scores (even going as far as tracking users’ statistics in third-party tools) to make judgments about reputation (A. L. Massanari, 2015, 119). Moderators & Administrators Reddit provides the ability for ordinary user accounts to become moderators, gaining additional powers and tools within particular subreddits to make editorial decisions about content submitted to each subcommunity. People that create subreddits automatically become the first moderators, and they can add any number of other moderators to co-lead the subreddit. Moderators are granted a lot of power over the information and rules presented to readers and members of a subreddit. 47 In addition to controlling information and accessibility, moderators can use provided tools to monitor settings, “mod mail” (a distinct private messaging system for all of the moderators of a subreddit), traffic statistics, spam reports, user bans, and content deletions. Regarding the rules of a subreddit, moderators may define any set of regulations for the community, but they are required to enforce reddit’s Content Policy, 48 written by the site’s administrators. 47 https://www.reddit.com/wiki/moderation 48 https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy 67 There is no hierarchy of power between moderators. However, reddit’s administrators – those employed by the company 49 – hold sway over the most important decisions about the platform and community regarding the site’s design and policies. For example, admins can permanently ban users, tweak ranking algorithms, promote content on the front page, or remove entire subreddits. While admins hold this power over the site, moderators and community members have protested some decisions to speak back to these leaders (Matias, 2016). Community & Subculture Reddit also has a unique subcultural bent to its participant collective. In its early days, reddit slowly introduced topical communities 50 oriented to a technology-focused audience (similar to Slashdot). Over time, thousands of subreddits were introduced by its community members. While participants across the platform refer to themselves as “redditors,” a holistic understanding of reddit remains complicated, since each of these subreddits maintains its own rules and social norms. Bergstrom (2011) notes that the general reddit audience took on a set of subcultural values, sometimes resulting in a “policing of norms and expected behaviour.” Similarly, (A. L. Massanari (2015) describes the emergent norms across the topical communities as a “playful” underground culture. While reddit has been called out in the media for a variety of incidents relating to pornography and abuse, the site and its user collective are particularly well-known for eccentric networked phenomenon (from manipulating online polls 51 to online civic engagement 52 ). 49 https://www.reddit.com/about/team/ 50 http://www.redditblog.com/2006/02/subreddit-fun.html 51 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Splashy_Pants 52 http://henryjenkins.org/2012/01/internet_blackout_sopa_reddit.html 68 The community is also known for its controversial members (Bergstrom, 2011). In particular, various subreddits related to abuse and pornography have been created, notably the /r/KotakuInAction community as a forefront of the Gamergate movement (A. Massanari, 2015). Even though each subreddit cultivates its own norms, the communities overlap and interact within the same platform, and therefore many participants hold varying judgments about being connected to “the rest of reddit” through association (Matias, 2016). News Spaces on reddit Social news sites have become a popular genre of sociotechnical system on the contemporary internet, and this neologism adapts the term “news” to describe the practice of curating information (from links of news articles to original eyewitness testimony) that other users on the platform view and vote on. As a network of communities, reddit possesses many types of news- related spaces. For instance, while links to news organizations’ articles are shared daily on large, general subreddits like /r/news or /r/worldnews, users also situate original information about particular events by connecting with locals, gathering information, and sharing it within event- or topic-oriented subreddits like /r/UkraineCrisis. Some subreddits employ a mix of both approaches, such as event-specific communities like /r/sandy or local subreddits like /r/boston. In any case above, any user can contribute to peer information aggregation by collecting information through the course of a developing event. For the purposes of this dissertation, I focus most of my analysis on individuals and groups that work together to compile information, rather than analyses of specific news-related subreddits (like Leavitt & Clark, 2014). Below, I discuss the method and process of sampling these cases. 69 Method The data used for this dissertation’s set of studies draws from two sources: public server logs collected via reddit’s public API – spanning January 24, 2006 to August 31, 2015 – and interview data and observations from ethnographic fieldwork started in June 2011. Trace Ethnography Mixed methods provide a rich approach to analyzing research questions. For the past two decades, the rise of digital phenomena and the increasing dependency on networked technologies has challenged ethnographic researchers to reflect on and extend their traditional qualitative methodologies and toolkits into the realm of mixed methods, provoking them to draw on statistical and computational techniques to analyze online participation. Many “digital” ethnographic approaches, applying to both theory-building and praxis, demand the extension (rather than replacement) of traditional methodological competencies, though some digital domains require innovation in encapsulating and replicating the core interpretive crux of ethnographic research. Digital ethnography tends to focus on traditional ethnographic approaches to online (and associated offline) phenomena, communities, or technologies (T. Boellstorff, 2008; Tom Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, Taylor, & Marcus, 2012; Hine, 2000, 2005; Paccagnella, 1997). Digital ethnographies require researchers to insert themselves into digital environments and online communities to better understand participants’ experiences, extending the traditional of “being there” (Hannerz, 2003) beyond mere “lurking” (Garcia, Standlee, Bechkoff, & Yan Cui, 2009) to an evaluation of these “virtual worlds in their own terms” (T. Boellstorff, 2008, 71). Not only does this kind of observation allow researchers to gain “insight into practices and meanings as they unfold,” but participating in these “built environments” allows the research to also grasp 70 the constraints of platform infrastructure on these communities of study (Tom Boellstorff et al., 2012, 55). Some online ethnographic approaches extend traditional observation techniques to encompass the analysis of digital trace data. Geiger & Ribes (2011) propose a complementary approach to incorporate the analysis of server log and other digital data within a larger ethnographic praxis by combining online traces with participant observation. Using databases, web scraping, and other computational techniques, researchers can reconstruct patterns and practices of individuals within particular mediated online systems. They argue that using these digital logs is valuable and valid, as participants regularly employ them in constructing their everyday experiences, as well as coordinating and making accountable many activities and interactions with other users. Put another way, “documents are the primary mechanism through which [many participants] not only know their global communities, but also act within them” (2). They argue for a core mixed-methods approach that “requires initial ethnographic fieldwork to identify the possible kinds of routines present in an organization, which are then located and aggregated by performing detailed documentary analysis of trace data” (8). More recently, Dubois & Ford (2015) extended trace data interpretation into trace data interviews, adapting the trace ethnography framework for one-on-one interviews based primarily in individuals’ generated server logs and online data. It is important to analyze these traces with the context of traditional observational techniques, because as Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995) argue, “[T]he ethnographer should not assume that the local meaning and import of written documents are transparent and unproblematic. Instead, he should seek to understand how documents are read, understood, and interpreted by members” (115-6). Such comprehension allows the research to reproduce “thick 71 descriptions,” or as (Wang, 2013) reframes, “thick data” posited against “big data.” However, Freelon (2014) argues that scholars will define the same traces differently depending on the context of the analysis and background of the researcher. A larger question challenges digital ethnographers: can digital ethnography be adapted to understand global systems? To understand a particular online community, it may require scholars to adopt a multi-sited approach (Burrell, 2009; Marcus, 1995) to understand a set of distributed participants from around the globe, each with their own local contexts and meanings. Rotman, Preece, He, & Druin (2012) call for an “extreme” ethnography that can scale with the size of the systems we study, though they note that “[t]he immense scope of the data, comprised of interactions between millions of users, requires the researchers to make a priori difficult decisions about the segments of data that are pertinent for addressing their research questions” (3). Vertesi (2009) also comments that ethnography must remain selective even as it extends outward in a multi-sited fashion: the researcher must scope the potential case based on the realistic possibilities involved (which also, to note, reflects the realities of the participants too). Star, (1999) stresses that “[t]here have always been inherent scale limits on ethnography, by definition” (383). Ethnography is not meant to produce a N-size study that is statistically representative of a population. But as technologies continue to scale and the behaviors of individuals react and adapt to the integration of those technologies into their everyday experiences, studying daily interactions continues to require new modes of thought and inquiry that challenge traditional approaches to research, particularly within ethnographic circles (Ribes, 2014). One of these challenges revolves around ethnographically studying the hardware and software of digital technologies. Cetina (2009) points out that non-human actors (i.e., 72 technological infrastructure) become just as important a partner in digital interaction as other humans, and therefore require just as much ethnographic interpretation. Star (1999) encourages the study of infrastructures (digital or not) because “infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices” leading to the conclusion that infrastructure is a core “part of human organization” (380). By ignoring infrastructure, researchers miss (and misinterpret) the fabric that pulls together human relationships in these spaces. However, in most instances, the inner workings of platforms and algorithms are “black box” and cannot be accessed by researchers, posing a significant barrier to understanding these systems and their impacts (Beaulieu, 2004; Burrell, 2012; Diakopoulos, 2013; Kockelman, 2013). A second challenge is the adoption of advanced computational techniques to identify or summarize behaviors in online communities at a holistic scale. Unsupervised machine learning techniques like clustering and natural language processing techniques like topic modeling allow the researcher to provide greater context to the behaviors they observe from a traditional ethnographic perspective. Computational ethnography then looks like an iterative combination of the two, where the researcher moves back and forth between exploration of trace data (at a macro level) and interpretation of observations and interviews (at a micro level). As Hsu (2014) points out, these data-informed approaches lead to an “augmented empiricism,” or as Burrell (2012) puts it, citing Howard Becker, “the nearer we get to the conditions in which [the people we are studying] actually do attribute meanings to objects and events, the more accurate our description of those meanings are likely to be.” 73 Ethnographic Methodology In this dissertation, I draw primarily from the extended case method (Burawoy, 1998). The extended case method (Burawoy, 1998; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 1999) draws from interpreted evidence grounded in micro-level participant observation to improve a macro-level theoretical framework. Unlike with grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) where the researcher aims to build new theory out of reflexive field work, those employing the extended case method extend a foundational theory and challenge it with “exceptional or deviant cases” (Burawoy, 1998, 278), particularly in the comparison across sites or cases, in order to produce larger generalizations and an improvement in the theory. The researcher aims to derive high-level understandings of society and culture from investigating the everyday practices of individuals, reiterating Geertz's (1973) call for thick description as a core methodological push within ethnographic practice. As (Burawoy, 1998) puts it, “Society [is], so to speak, composed of cells each encoded with the same structure, reflecting the essential character of the totality in which they [exist]. It d[oes] not matter which cell one look[s] at; the purpose [i]s to arrive at features that [a]re generalizable to society as a whole” (277): a larger society claim about culture. Coincidentally, iterating between computational analysis of large-scale trace data and interpretation of the expressions of everyday experiences from members of a community augment the extended case method’s logic. By adopting a holistic view of possible cases, aggregate modeling of social structures and behaviors means that individual cases can be sampled from those structural signatures and analyzed from ethnographic perspectives. Below, I explain the data used for this dissertation as well as the identification of news events through computational and ethnographic means. 74 Data Server Logs A foundation of analysis for this project were public server logs from reddit.com. Reddit provides an application programming interface (API) that allows access to submission, comment, and user data. 53 Over the course of 4 years, this public API was used to collect various datasets from a variety of subreddits. The API limits the amount of data able to be collected, based on a 1000 post limitation per subreddit (depending on the ranking algorithm, like “top” or “new”), 1000 comment limitation per post, and 1000 submission history per user. Sometimes custom written Python scripts were compiled to scrape data from reddit’s platform without using the public API (such as for user profile information). In addition to these opportunistic sampling strategies, I also used a historical reddit dataset collected via the public API compiled by Stuck_In_the_Matrix and released in July 2015 54 and September 2015. 55 This dataset, first comprising all publicly available comment submissions and later including all publicly available post submissions, was collected via reddit’s API by querying the /r/all queue, which is the only API endpoint that allows access to the data without limitations. The full dataset comprises 197,517,928 post submissions and 1,830,807,828 comment submissions from January, 24, 2006 through August, 31, 2015. The data was organized in an optimized PostgreSQL database on a local server housed at my university. 53 https://www.reddit.com/dev/api 54 https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_every_publicly_available_reddit_comment 55 https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3mg812/full_reddit_submission_corpus_now_available_2006/ 75 Identifying Cases: Breaking News Events To study peer information aggregation, I observed news-related posting, commentary, and moderation using reddit’s various subreddit communities as field sites. To gain a holistic understanding of breaking news practices, I spent time both observing participatory behaviors during these major and minor events as well as used computational methods to detect events in the server log data. In general, I used three approaches: 1) algorithmic anomaly detection (specifically, the Seasonal Hybrid ESD algorithm 56 ), to find exceptional events based on various activities (votes, comments, etc.) over time, 2) observation during the development of events themselves (as mentioned before, Hurricane Sandy in 2013 and the Paris attacks in 2015, as well as the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and a local earthquake in Los Angeles in 2015), and 3) database querying based on observed methods of updating post and comments. For detecting anomalies, I queried the database on a year-by-year basis within specific subreddits to look at spikes detected around commenting, upvoting, etc. I wrote code in R that drew from the results of the Seasonal Hybrid ESD algorithm (trained on longitudinal data for every hour of data in each year; for example, see Figure 3) to automatically display trending keywords – based on a top-occurring n-gram analysis (Suen, 1979) – within each anomaly period. While many of the anomalies detected were top headlines in mainstream media news, the most notable factor of many of them was the distinction between developing events (such as uncertainty following a crisis or natural disaster) and singular announcements (such as the death of a major celebrity). While the anomaly detection helped set the stage for types of breaking news, it usually pointed toward the largest events that matched mainstream media coverage 56 Developed and open-sourced by Twitter: https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection 76 (especially given the per-hour analysis, where many people contributed articles lagging tens of minutes after the event from mainstream news venues). Figure 3. Results of the Seasonal Hybrid ESD model from a sample of late 2014 data per hour. Blue circles are anomalies detected in the given time frame using parameters set at max anomalies (2%), p-value of 0.01, and threshold of 95% confidence. When observing and experiencing a particular event, I conducted the usual ethnographic procedures, such as writing field notes (mostly comprised of saving screenshots, bookmarking URLs, downloading media, and occasionally scraping data). In some cases, such as an earthquake in Los Angeles, I directly participated in providing updates, and I followed up with a few individuals (in particular, moderators involved in the subreddits where the events were being covered). In the largest instance of participant observation, during the late 2015 Paris attacks, I started observation about 10 minutes after the initial explosion and continued for about 6 hours, watching mainstream media news coverage co-evolve with the live information aggregation on reddit. In addition to taking field notes and directly participating in some of the aggregation tasks, I also made audio recordings of my own experiences and observances. Finally, in the case of database querying, I queried a variety of subreddits to find instances of developing news events. I looked at each year of the historical dataset to find specific instances of post and comment submissions that aggregated information in the style I 77 had encountered and observed in prior years. These queries included traces of posts and comments that were edited, had many upvotes, contained keywords like “EDIT” (or other event- specific contextual terms like “earthquake,” “dead,” etc.), contained specific formats like timestamps, occurred in the /r/live subreddit, and other signatures. General knowledge obtained over time from my participation within the community also helped point me in the direction of “well known” events that I then looked up in the historical dataset. Finally, during interviews, some participants pointed me in the direction of further events that I had missed (in which they had participated), which I also identified in the historical dataset. Interviews & Participant Observation The ethnographic component of this dissertation drew from 53 face-to-face interviews and over 4 years of participant observation. Participant Observation I spent over four years as a participant observer within reddit’s community and platform. I created an account in June 2011, and over the course of these four years I read and participated in a number of subreddit communities, ranging from defaults to niche topics. I also attended and contributed to the organization of offline events held by the local /r/LosAngeles subreddit. My online participation ranged from subreddits I would participate in directly on a regular basis to those I would read and monitor over the course of a few years. In particular, when possible, I monitored the coverage of breaking news events. For example, in 2012, I spent a dedicated two months following the developments and aftermath of a subreddit dedicated to Hurricane Sandy (/r/sandy) as well as submissions related to Hurricane Sandy across a number of other sub-communities. In particular crisis moments, such as the April 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing or the November 2015 Paris shootings, I spent hours on the 78 site, observing the activity of dozens of people as the events unfolded across multiple subreddits, tracking moderators’ activities in response to the flood of information, and even in one instance joining the editorial team of a live thread. In all instances, I took a variety of visual and textual field notes in the form of screenshots, audio recordings, and short written memos. Interviews I also conducted 53 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with reddit participants, most of whom had aggregated information during a breaking news event. The interviews were conducted between November 4, 2015 and December 11, 2015. The sample also included moderators, administrators, and professional journalists that had used reddit for reporting or experimentation (or as an ordinary participant). Additionally, I messaged with another dozen reddit contributors and moderators to provide additional context. Recruitment occurred by messaging reddit user accounts via the reddit platform. Potential interview participants were chosen by identifying reddit contributors that participated in contributing or moderating information during the unexpected news events, which were discovered in the iterative process explained above. In total, I identified over 350 posts, comments, or live threads related to a valid news event. I also identified subreddits and moderators of news-related communities. Interviews were conducted with reddit participants that self-selected into the interview and had read a provided IRB information sheet. The questions of the semi-structured interviews focused on: general participation within reddit; the emergent practices of collecting, aggregating, evaluating, and broadcasting content when conducting peer information aggregation; perceptions of imagined audiences and dynamics of attentions. In specific cases, I asked particular questions about interest and expertise in the event the interviewee participated in, how they collaborated with other people, and the conflicts 79 that arose between their information behaviors and their use of the platform or interactions with moderators and administrators. In every case, I queried the database to ask about specific pieces of information in the individual’s trace data. In every case, the interviews were conducted post-hoc. However, the range of time between the period of information aggregation and the interview ranged from 4 years to as little as 5 days. Though I requested to conduct interviews during breaking news situations, these few requests were rejected, mainly on the grounds of task difficulty. As Gans (1980) argues, “Observing journalists is not very different from observing other people; the main thing I had to learn, other than the journalists' technical jargon, was to stay out of people's way when the selection and production processes became hectic” (75). This revelation was also something I encountered, as the process of aggregation on reddit was particularly frenetic. In a few instances, I was able to observe and record the activity of participants during breaking news events, and I asked follow-up questions during interviews. Interviews also helped expose behaviors and thoughts not captured by trace data. In addition to the difficulty of access during breaking news situations, interviews were also primarily conducted – in lieu of solely using server log data or relying strongly on observations – because “aggregation tends to be a very cognitive rather than kinetic activity… meaning that many of its most important processes are internal and cannot be easily accessed through observation” and “[e]thnographers of digital news production have noted how difficult it can be to observe processes that take place primarily through screenwork and consist largely of journalists sitting silently in front of computers” (Coddington, 2015, 120). The interviews were conducted primarily over Skype or Google Hangout video chat (occasionally the video was dropped in favor of audio, due to quality or request for increased 80 anonymity); two of the interviews were conducted in person in Los Angeles. I used a semi- structured interview process, using a pre-established set of interviews questions that evolved as each discussion took place. The interviews lasted on average about 45 minutes: a few were shorter at 35 minutes, while a few more extended longer (up to 2.5 hours). Of the interview participant sample, 26 (49.1%) lived outside of the United States: countries included Mexico, England, Netherlands, France, Scandinavia, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and New Zealand. Of those within the United States, 22 (81.5%) identified as white or Caucasian. 5 (9.62%) of the interviewees were women. The sample’s ages ranged from 18 to 44 (with an approximate average of 26 years old). The interview participants were highly educated: of those in the sample, 48 (90.57%) had (or were in the process of getting) a bachelor’s degree. They ranged in experience on reddit from 1 to 10 years (with an approximate average of 4 years of experience). Once all of the interviews were conducted, they were transcribed 57 and then coded in MaxQDA. 58 I conducted two rounds of coding: one to establish large categories of evidence and another with deeper investigation into the actual behaviors and conflicts I observed based on the theoretical frameworks I employed (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). While interviews were not coded throughout the process, I made rough notes on the emergent, interconnected themes, which through a constant comparative method prompted additional questions in future interviews (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). 57 Transcription services were provided by Rev.com. 58 http://maxqda.com 81 Ch. 4: Motivations and Values for Peer Information Aggregation The first chapter in this dissertations seeks to answer the question: “Who are the participants that do peer information aggregation work, and what are their motivations, prior experience, and values?” To understand the work conducted by participants in peer information aggregation, we need to understand two personal dimensions. First, participants’ motivations set the entry point for peer information aggregation practices. Second, the values that participants brought to this work shaped what kind of events and information contexts they counted as newsworthy. These two dimensions help to reveal the factors that affect gatekeeping practices when we consider reddit as a possible alternative space to information gatekeeping practices. As I demonstrate in this chapter, aggregation represents an alternative to traditional news reporting. In most cases, aggregation is not a replacement for, but instead remains a supplement or an extension of, professional journalistic news work. Throughout this chapter, I point to motivations and values around newsworthiness that both position aggregation work as distinct from and reliant on the interactions that people have with contemporary news. On the one hand, the motivations around aggregation tie into a perceived distance between traditional news spaces and online community spaces. On the other hand, values of newsworthiness strongly depend on the kind of responses that traditional journalists and news audiences have in reaction to developing events. Because gatekeeping focuses on the factors that impact how information becomes available to people, a social media platform exists as an alternative for news consumers to curate their own audiences by acting as a space where people can contribute original information or share information from other traditional media institutions. While Barzilai-Nahon recognizes in the network gatekeeping framework that it is important to understand the “practical alternatives 82 available” to people who are not traditionally in control of information, aggregation does not necessarily present as clean-cut an alternative as the “gated autonomy” that she proposes (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008, 1501). Because aggregation involves participants who are both gated (they consume information from mainstream media organizations) and gatekeepers (they republish this information to other audiences), it is important to understand the motivations and values of these contributors who judge information as it passes through this new kind of aggregating middleman. To understand how network gatekeeping practices impact peer information aggregation on reddit, we need to understand the context of news on reddit, how people use it as an alternative news source, community members’ news values, and participants’ motivations for contributing to reddit as an alternative news space. This chapter explores reddit as one alternative to the traditional gatekeeping narrative from traditional news organizations. Why reddit for News First, I explore how participants described the attraction to reddit as a news source and what this platform in particular provides participants compared to other news platforms. Today, news consumers use a spectrum of channels to get news, whether from traditional media organizations or through networked social platforms like Twitter. 59 In 2010, 46% of Americans received news from four to six media platforms daily (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010). Reddit exists as one of many possible news choices that consumers might make on a daily basis, but the question of why remains. Homophily influences human choices (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001), and scholars recognize that “selective exposure based on partisan 59 http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/ 83 affinity” contributes to news source selection (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009). However, information quality does little to influence digital news choice. Instead, the choice of particular news sources relates to a “consequence of other everyday life practices, rather than as an information-seeking activity” (Moody, 2011, 1). The choices of news also differ between journalists and consumers regarding what each group finds newsworthy, in addition to preferences around thematic choices of news content (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2013). In my interviews, participants who contributed to peer information aggregation relied on reddit’s platform as a shared space for a specific set of audience members. The draw of reddit within the context of gatekeeping highlights why reddit is used for news and why it exists as an alternative (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) compared to other information sharing and broadcast spaces. Below, I demonstrate participants’ recognition of the convenience of using reddit for news, and I illustrate participants’ perceptions of reddit’s alternative status to mainstream media, particularly related to speed of information circulation and the presence of crowd participation. Convenience First and foremost, people who use reddit use it as a platform to keep track of many interests simultaneously, one of which is news. But why do these contributors get news from reddit, compared to other spaces or sources? Only a small portion of those interviewed expressed their use of reddit as a primary news source. More often, participants seemed to talk about reddit as a supplement to their news consumption in other spaces. These sources could include local television news reporting, international mainstream newspapers, popular radio (like NPR), or online spaces like Twitter or Google News. Frequently, encountering news on reddit occurred as a byproduct of their everyday use of the platform. When browsing reddit for entertainment, for instance, it was easy 84 to switch modes by opening a new tab in a browser with a news subreddit or searching through the front page looking for news headlines. All participants also expressed a familiarity with how news appeared on reddit. In most cases, they referred to major subreddits, like /r/worldnews and /r/news, where rules state that contributions must link to established media and journalism sources. In other cases, they recognized that information might appear in popular or niche subreddits (like a phone-captured video of a massive explosion in China upvoted heavily in the /r/videos subreddit). Without at least a year of experience, which all interview participants had, they may not have known what kind of factors influence the circulation of specific types of information or news within reddit’s various channels. Experience within the community norms of the platform set expectations for the value that reddit could provide in relation to finding news-related information. Comparisons to Other Organizations and Platforms Second, participants expressed that particular information dynamics of reddit – such as the affordance for people to quickly upvote information to prominent visible rankings – attracted them to the platform, compared to waiting or searching for news on mainstream media organizations’ websites or through unfiltered spaces like Twitter. When participants compared reddit as a source for information relative to other platforms, they highlighted access to a variety of sources, the perceived speed of information arrival, and the value of crowd participation. Differences in Source Variety Interview participants expressed a range of news-related engagement with mainstream media news organizations (from CNN and The New York Times to BBC, FOX News, Al Jazeera, France24, and more-specific, local news reporters, particularly for those living outside of the United States), social media platforms (like Twitter and Facebook), and even specific news apps, 85 like those that send out breaking news alerts as push notifications to individuals’ mobile phones. Some participants mentioned reading newspapers or listening to radio, but for the most part all kept up with news online, and many relied on news from national and local television channels. When people identified reddit as a primary news source, they distinctly compared it with mainstream organizations. According to SebayaKeto, a moderator and four-year participant on the site, she doesn’t use social media sites, like Facebook or Twitter, and looks to an assortment of mainstream media for news. However, she has recently shifted her attention to reddit: “I used to look at a lot of different mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, all that but the past couple of years I get most of my news from reddit these days.” For people that prefer reddit as a primary source, frequently they also referred to reddit as “the first place to go.” Evan was a DC local when he helped participate in collecting information after the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013. Over time, he said he gravitated toward online RSS feeds to get his news, making the transition to reddit simple. When he first heard about the news, his online experiences for gathering information pointed him in reddit’s direction: “[My coworker] said, ‘There was a bomb that went off at the Boston Marathon.’ I said, ‘Oh my God. I got to get to reddit.’ That was the first thing was I have to get to reddit and see what's going on.” Sometimes the perception of reddit as a first destination varied: reddit was dependable for immediate information after an event but not necessarily for ordinary daily news. One interviewee from Scandinavia, and a veteran of five years on reddit, explained to me that most of his daily news appeared in The Economist, or he gathered information via word of mouth talking to friends. Once he learns of the initial bit of information, though, he would “immediately… go to reddit to find more.” Reddit, he claimed, was better than other platforms and helpful for finding niche news, but mainstream organizations might be better for world news: “I think 86 actually in terms of daily world events kind of things, I haven't really found an online community like something on reddit that works perfectly for that. I think that traditional news media – well, certain traditional world media – still do a better job at that task. But for certain types of news, there are definitely replacements on Reddit…” On the flip side, other participants specifically considered reddit a poor alternative to professional journalistic organizations. For SlyRatchet, a young student in England and a user for three years, most of his news comes from physical and digital newspapers, especially to satisfy his interest in local politics, but he tries to avoid the “huge amount of fluff” he finds in mainstream reporting. Still, the quality of information on reddit was a concern for him: If you're in an emergency situation, you need to go to an authoritative figure, you know? You don't just ask anybody. Much less, you don't ask somebody who could potentially be on the other side of the world ... I wouldn't 100% trust Reddit for information. There always is that potential in a user-generated situation that it completely lacks any oversight. … There's always that danger for mistrust on Reddit, which is why I would hesitate to rely on it in an important situation…” All in all, participants generally relied on multiple sources; it was rare for any individual to claim reliance on only one information channel. Participants tended to defend the use of multiple organizations as a strength in their news consumption. Ctaggie, another young student from the United States and a three-year member, explained his penchant for multiple perspectives so that he could evaluate it from a variety of angles: “I get a variety of news sources. I read CNN, I read the New York Times, I read Fox News. I try and get a pretty good picture of what's going on because I feel like everybody's got an agenda. I try and get a nice, rounded picture, especially if it's something breaking.” The demand for multiple perspectives in particular stemmed from this “agenda,” meaning that many participants expressed a common distrust of mainstream media. One complaint that occurred multiple times revolved around participants’ wariness of news organizations that kept 87 repeating content to fill air time, especially during ongoing events. Empw complained to me, “The 24-hour news cycle never stops. It's 24 hours. That's why you see, not necessarily on reddit but on a CNN or on a FOX or something, all these fluff pieces, all this regurgitation, and it's because people are looking for the next thing. They have to keep it coming.” Perhaps more pointed were grievances about perceptions that certain mainstream news organizations were unreliable or untrustworthy. While these complaints were not particularly frequent, interviewees who mentioned them were especially critical. Participants associated such perceptions with specific organizations like CNN or FOX News, illustrating these organizations’ skewed or overly-emotional reporting. PabstyLoudmouth, a member of four years and an older- than-average redditor, recounted that he tends to get his local news on television, alongside his much-preferred sports news. Even though he uses CNN to get general daily news, he explained his distaste for particular organizations, especially when they were reported on “worldwide news”: BBC has a much better reputation than the National Enquirer or TMZ. You tend to stick with sources that are a little bit more honest, I would say. Where CNN it's not always perfect but for the most part they're trying to give you the correct news rather than just create quick-date headlines. They'll exaggerate certain parts of the story and not really go into the information aspect about the story. Another interviewee, a student from Indonesia now living in the Midwest United States, usually gets his daily curated information from Google News. When he wants to look at a news organization, he’ll choose the BBC. However, for him, CNN skews their reporting in emotional ways rather than providing basic reviews of what happened: I personally don't like CNN very much. … It's just too sensational for me. If I go on BBC, I'll get a nice article saying what happened… About a week ago, [for] the democratic debate… I go on Google News or something, and the article's giving generally a review of what happened, and then I go on CNN, and it's a huge front page spread on how Hillary absolutely won. So things like that just sort of turn me away from it. … I just like to be given the news and not the emotions along with it. 88 Participants’ responses to perceived styles of reporting of journalistic organizations highlights one reason why reddit acts as an alternative: not only because they found information from sources that were not distorting the way stories were presented, but also because – through aggregation – many sources can be compiled in one space for the reader to evaluate. Speed The speed of information flows also emerged as a reason why participants referred to reddit as a preferred alternative. Namely, they noted that news-related information appeared on reddit faster than mainstream media organizations, and even in some cases other social media sites, could report on events. Generally, participants identified seeing information in one space before the other as a marker of speed. However, they rarely mentioned the factors going on behind the scenes that might have impacted the speed of information circulation. For example, a high school student in the southern United States – who has been on reddit for three years and usually looks at news reports from the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New York Times as well as a variety of reporters on Twitter – described the differences between the “constant updates” of reddit versus the “delay” of mainstream media, which convinced him to make reddit the “first place I’ll check.” For the older PabstyLoudmouth, he perceived his own work of aggregating information after the November 2015 Paris attacks as faster than tweets from mainstream media organizations: “Most of the time, they're slower. Even the tweets I was getting from probably my best source, from the BBC, it was 10-15 minutes, or I'd say 5-6 minutes, slower than what we were doing. Those 5-6 minutes could make a difference to somebody.” One of the reasons for speed that participants cited was the benefit of a large community. Peva3, a young participant from the Eastern U.S. who has participated on reddit for 6 years, 89 claimed that he relies on the BBC and CNN when they have reporters on the ground during an event, but reddit remains his go-to space for “mainstream news.” While he has tried Twitter in the past, he recognized that crowd voting afforded additional speed that pushed information into his line of site before other journalists: “I wanted to know the news as it's happening, so I tried Twitter and all that kind of stuff beforehand, and it was just never as fast as reddit. It's mostly just because of the voting system. If there was something crazy happening, people would upload it as soon as they saw it and as soon as that got enough attention, there it is on the front page before it breaks on CNN.” I explore the perceived impact of crowd participation more in the next section below. While some, like peva3, did not prefer Twitter, other participants’ opinions varied in relation to this social network site. In some cases, Twitter was seen as a better alternative for quick information circulation, but also that the platform comes with the additional cost of information overload. Because so many people produce tweets in reaction to developing events, the volume leads to too much noise, making it difficult to find the most relevant information quickly. Alphaque, an older New Zealander who has been on reddit for five years, told me that his experiences during a serious local earthquake led him to believe that Twitter was helpful. However, more recently, Twitter’s influx of information means that it’s hard to filter down to the information he wants to see: When the Christchurch quakes hit, I was on Twitter quite a bit, and I actually had Twitter open at the time, and that's where a lot of the news came through immediately. Nowadays, not so much because Twitter has just become a bit more... just a little bit more noise and doesn't come through as clearly as it used to. I just go back to Reddit. With the upvote/downvote system they've got, it does at least bring more relevant news articles at the front page. Still, some participants also noted that in recent years, reddit’s ability to surface information from developing events quickly – and especially quicker than other sources – has diminished. 90 Frequently, these concerns included mention of changes to the platform’s codebase that the reddit administrators made in 2015, changing the way that the front page algorithm worked. I explore these discussions in more depth later in Chapter 7. Crowd Participation In addition to speed, participants continuously mentioned the benefit of crowd participation. The inclusion of a large collective of participants made reddit a viable alternative to other sources, because these crowds could help surface information given the site’s core architectural mechanics of voting and ranking. (As I explain later in this chapter, crowd participation was also a stepping stone to motivate contributions to peer information aggregation.) Interviewees repeatedly stressed the importance of crowd-based mechanisms for filtering information, especially when it came to scale. For example, alphaque claimed that reddit was able to surface news quickly because with “the number of users they have and how quickly the news gets posted, [and] how quickly it gets uploaded to the front page… It's just purely down to the number of users they have from the site.” Cynthia, a western United States who has used reddit in her one year of membership for local city news, claimed that she went to reddit first instead of other platforms because the distributed network of users would be able to find and post the necessary information immediately: “My first instinct was actually to go on reddit, so not Google News, not any of that. Because I'm like if something is going on right away, like if something is going on right now I feel like it's just felt like [redditors] would be more on top of it than the BBC or something. … I think it's a little bit of a numbers thing, right?” She then continued to reflect on how this crowd dynamic extended beyond the capabilities of traditional journalistic teams, giving reddit a sizeable advantage, particularly to say when something is potentially incorrect: 91 Because you have the BBC who maybe have like maybe twenty reporters on it, and then you have reddit which has like what? Thousands? Chances are there's probably somebody who is much closer to the situation. Not to mention redditors are also pretty good at finding information from other sources too and having that discussion. It's not just like I like the multiplicity of voices on reddit. I think that that's important to have people comment and say this makes sense, this doesn't make sense… Another benefit placing reddit as an alternative revolved around the crowd’s ability to determine relevancy. Instead of having a team of editors decide what the news was, the “crowd” through its voting projected a sense of relevance. Interestingly, some interviewees described the process of upvoting relevant information as distinctly more “objective” than editorial choice. Harrymuesli, a graduate student in the Netherlands (and participant of two years) explained how he depended on crowd voting to mark what was worth reading. He explained how his normal reading activity was pretty similar to mainstream reporting: “The way I use reddit for news is pretty much the same as in normal news websites, where you just go up to the website – for example the front page of /r/worldnews – and then read the headlines.” However, for him, voting, and “just an algorithm” to sort those votes, replaced journalistic decisions: While other sites, like CNN, or any of them including the Guardian (which I read a lot), while they do employ dozens of journalists who decide for you what is important and also kind of framing the news in a way that they think should be their voice. In that way, reddit is much more open, and I guess it has the potential to be much more… what's the word… objective, because of what I've just said. There's thousands and thousands of people participating and just an algorithm to see what is important and what not.” Finally, the benefit of reddit as an alternative with crowd participation was not limited to voting and filtering. In addition to those factors, participants’ preferences also hinged on conversation and discussion, generated by a massive community of with mixed opinions. DonTago, a /r/worldnews moderator, explained his view of how users in his community used reddit for discussion. “I think most people like the atmosphere of the comments section, seeing what the overarching themes that people are discussing, seeing how others feel. It is like a community; it 92 is a really bare-bones format,” he said. “They don't like any of the fancy frills that other news websites… have. I think that is one thing they like about reddit the most: it is just a really really big community with a really diverse background of people that are discussing things that they are interested in.” Perhaps ironically, while some participants heralded reddit as a better space for news-related discussion than the spaces provided by mainstream organizations, interviewees occasionally seemed to overlook the particularly blunt (or even unpleasant) responses that frequently appear in reddit’s forums (Bergstrom, 2011; A. Massanari, 2015; A. L. Massanari, 2015). For instance, Prad, a student in the United States and two-year redditor, described his experiences on reddit in a surprisingly positive light: It's also a great place to have discussion about news and so forth. Some of the comment sections of sites like CNN and so forth are just ... They are so awful, the people there. Some of the things that are posted there, it's like, “Wow…” but Reddit is kind of a civilized community to discuss news. All in all, those I interviewed saw reddit as an alternative to other platforms and organizations because of speed and crowds. These dimensions provided both readers and contributors on reddit different ways of thinking about how information and news could move within and across the system. Their responses suggest that the gatekeeping practices of traditional journalists could be perceived as overshadowed by an aggregation platform like reddit that provides a different set of affordances. Participants and Experiences In the previous section, I explored how participants saw reddit as valuable. While I noted that experience on the platform and with the social norms of the community led to perceptions of these values, experience also contributes to participants’ transition to contributors of peer information aggregation. The experiences of potential contributors set them up to engage with 93 information aggregation and shape the way that they gatekeep information in this alternative space. The composition of any online community’s members varies depending on the needs (e.g., friendship) and behaviors (e.g., information exchange and social support) of its members (Ridings & Gefen, 2006). On reddit, some of these needs revolve around perceived needs for information, such as information related to news and developing events. Not all members have experience with news-related information, but encounters can shape eventual participants’ motivations to contribute. The experiences of online community members matter. Involvement in contributing to the community plays a key role in tenure and success. Over time, some communities experience shifts from elite users to increasing numbers of less active members (Kittur, Chi, Pendleton, Suh, & Mytkowicz, 2007), though as online communities endure, the veteran members that stick around tend to be the participants that share more (Nov, Naaman, & Ye, 2009). While quality contributions tend to come from those who provide quantity, in some cases the highest quality contributions stem from infrequent users (Anthony, Smith, & Williamson, 2005). Identification also remains a key facet of people’s experiences that affect motivations and values. For instance, online communities’ membership and goals strengthen group attachment (Ren, Kraut, & Kiesler, 2007). In mature online communities, recognition of members’ contributions remains essential to maintaining a sense of belonging (Iriberri & Leroy, 2009). Just as with other communities that “often define themselves through or reassert their boundaries through collective memories” (A. L. Massanari, 2015, 77), reddit harkens back to specific moments that mark positives and negatives, especially in the cases of collective action around news events. 94 Volunteering in peer production contexts remains key to community development. According to Benkler and Nissembaum (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006), “it seems that peer- production enterprises thrive on, and give opportunity for, relatively large scale and effective scope for volunteerism, or behavior motivated by, and oriented towards, positive social relations” (402-403). However, in cases of online information circulation, particularly in news- related contexts, while many people might step up to volunteer in information collection, and while participants may be well versed in the social norms of a community, they may also be inexperienced in information evaluation techniques. Though so-called “citizen journalists” may be considered information producers as much as journalists, they frequently have little or no journalism experience (Robinson & DeShano, 2011), though these individuals often feel similar notions of entitlement to information and journalistic professionalism. Prior experience factors into the motivations and values of peer information aggregation volunteers. Generally, prior experience can be described two ways: 1) prior experience with journalistic practices, and therefore deeper understanding of journalistic norms, like how to find proper sources and do proper verification of information; and 2) prior experience with using reddit’s platform and participating in its community, and therefore knowledge about what the community expects from news reporting and how to do that reporting – or find news generally – within the reddit ecosystem. Professionals and Volunteers Out of all of the peer information aggregation participants I interviewed, only a handful had backgrounds as professional journalists. In cases where the participants were journalists, they made definitive decisions to use their expertise and resources within the news organization to aid in the aggregation work for other participants. 95 For example, naly_d, a former journalist in New Zealand, contributed early information that his team received in the newsroom to other participants with whom he coordinated as they aggregated information across weeks’ worth of comment threads in reaction to the MH370 plane disappearance in 2014. He recounted how these actions provided better quality information based on his experience of newswork and access to resources: [I] said, “Hey look I’m a reporter, I’m gonna if you want I’m gonna message you guys every time I hear something or that I can verify something that you guys are seeking verification on, if that’s OK with you. I don’t mind whether you use it or not, but I’m just kind of trying to help you guys feel a little bit more secure in the stuff you’re reporting. TeoLolstoy, a redditor of five years and a journalist in Switzerland, was proactive about drawing from his training when aiding others in peer information aggregation, particularly in light of verification practices. He told me, “I would never post stuff that is not at least confirmed by true sources. I think that's what you learn when you're learning your first lesson about journalism. I think it should be, especially in a live thread, it shouldn't be any commentaries or opinion pieces that has nothing to do in a live thread. It should be coherent.” In a large majority of cases, though, people did not have any training in a professional news organization or with journalistic norms, such as information sourcing or verification. However, in many instances, these aggregation volunteers expressed a mindset and process for doing information work that mirrored the kinds of norms present in professional news situations: the perceived “professional tenets of journalism” (Holton, Coddington, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2013, 723). Frequently, interviewees would use terms like “news” without much distinction between information circulated on the platform and the professional news produced by professionals within organizational settings. However, a number of participants drew distinct lines between their own volunteer aggregation work and the work of journalists. As empw described, “I didn't feel like I was being a big journalist, because I wasn't going out and finding the story. I was a 96 megaphone to all of the people that were reading…” They see what they do as different, but in some cases they describe peer information aggregation as more valuable than the “single focus” that working within one media company affords. Naly_d even illustrated that peer information aggregation draws from particular instincts about information, while journalists merely have the upper edge in that they can rely on the veracity of information in their organizational context: The only difference is the quality of information. When you're in a newsroom, it's as simple as I've got access to watch the live voices and live Associated Press feeds... You've got access to the voices, the AP and AFP wire service, you've got Getty photos, all of that sort of stuff… The process itself isn't any different. It's an instinctual thing, and it's like a builder building a house. They know how to build a house, whether it's a five story mansion or a one room shack, it's just the tools at their disposal are different for those two kinds of buildings. They do them both the same way, it's just the materials and tools that they have… Prior Experience and Past Events Alongside the endeavor to do journalistic work, prior experience with news-related events on reddit also impacts motivations and values of peer information aggregation. Reddit remains a community obsessed with chronicling its own collective history (A. L. Massanari, 2015, 77), and longtime members on reddit have encountered a variety of events that affected the platform in critical ways. Usually, these events are related to some form of collaborative action, like TwitchPlaysPokemon (a distributed, simultaneous video game experience 60 ) or political reactions to the 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act (Leavitt, 2012). A subset of these events revolved around local, national, or global crises, where collective action around these developing events led to positive or negative outcomes. Such events therefore played a large role in the creation of major social norms or shifts in values for members of the reddit community. 60 “TwitchPlayedPokemon: Analyzing The Phenomenon.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZC6h9Us5m8 97 Generally, a fair number of participants referred to the information aggregation work they conducted as similar to, or even influenced by, what other people had done for similar events. Frequently, though, these events blur. For example, JP – who has been a reddit user for seven years – collected and updated information after the Boston Marathon bombing; he explained how he had been influenced by prior aggregation threads: “I think some of them were probably game- related – E3 announcements, or something like that – but I believe that there was one for the Boston Bombing itself, the couple days prior or whatever, where that event happened and somebody had done something very similar to what I was doing.” Another student (also a member of reddit’s community for seven years) who helped with information aggregation for the Boston Marathon aftermath noted that encountering updates from other users for various events was common: “I guess I've been on reddit for a long time, and that's just the way that a lot of people write posts, is that they just have a bunch of edits where they list them a lot of the time.” While in some minds the various events reported on reddit mixed together fuzzily, a number of notable exceptions remained impressed in the collective memories of members of the community. The two most memorable crises that interview participants referred to were the Aurora, Colorado shooting and, especially, the Boston Marathon bombing. They mention these for good reason: unlike most events where one or a handful of participants will aggregate information for less than a day within one post or live thread, both the Aurora shooting and the Boston bombing were covered by a group of redditors over the course of weeks and through more than a dozen posts. The Aurora, Colorado shooting aggregation threads – as I described in the introduction – were the first time these updates occurred at such a large scale. The Boston Marathon bombing coverage, on the other hand, had a more complicated history. While a number of redditors updated information through the usual news-related 98 channels like /r/news, a group of motivated users created the /r/findbostonbombers subreddit to vet photos and other media in order to attempt to identify suspects. After bringing visibility to a university student named Sunil Tripahi, it was revealed that this information was incorrect when the Boston police department released names and photos of the Tsarnaev brothers. Professional journalists in mainstream media organizations pounced on the mistake to denounce the reddit- driven effort. 61 62 63 64 65 While the Aurora shooting updates were seen in a positive light, and though some members of the reddit community conducted similarly beneficial work during the Boston Marathon bombing situation, the /r/findbostonbombers subreddit was upheld in the media as a disaster, and many people who are longtime participants on reddit continue to uphold it as the epitome of what one should not do in a crisis situation. DonTago, who became a moderator of the /r/worldnews subreddit after the crisis, explained that it “still gets brought up” even when it is “ancient history in reddit terms.” Spencer, an 8-year veteran from England and a moderator of one of the major European subreddits, told me that the /r/findbostonbombers fiasco changed the way that most participants in reddit’s communities think about the consequences of collective behavior: [This event shaped the kind of news reporting that people do now] massively. It's certainly in the back of my mind, and frankly I think it's in the back of even the general commentators’ minds. In many instances, people say no witch hunts, and they refer and 61 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/magazine/should-reddit-be-blamed-for-the-spreading-of-a-smear.html?_r=0 62 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/bombings-trip-up-reddit-in-its-turn-in-spotlight.html 63 http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7 64 http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/04/reddit_and_the_boston_marathon_bombings_how_th e_site_reckoned_with_its_own.html 65 http://www.salon.com/2015/04/15/the_boston_marathon_and_reddit_when_the_internets_deluded_amateur_hour_d etectives_ran_amok/ 99 they'll cast back to that one event. I think it was quite defining actually. Just how a group of people mean to do well, did so wrong. It is remarkable the sheer number of participants who have referred back to the Boston Marathon bombings to frame what they should and should not do in ongoing situations when collecting, summarizing, and publishing information. A popular microcelebrity from New Zealand and redditor for three years, theearthquakeguy, noted it as a failure of ease and speed of responsive action. He explained that people usually want to “provide the right and correct information,” and while “any sort of false information can be filtered pretty quickly,” the major exception to the rule was the Boston bombings. Even for reddit’s administrators, the Boston Marathon incident helped established rules for future community guidelines. As a former admin explained, when a similar effort emerged in response to another shooting incident, the admins stepped in to stop it: People also quickly after, or soon after the Boston Bombing incident, there was a shooting in the D.C. Navy Yard, and journalist set up a subreddit called, “Find the Navy Yard Shooters,” as a clear troll. And they were putting images, things in there. And there was 5 or 6 people in there and they probably didn't even help. And then we shut that down, but also breaking some different rules, and then a lot of different media outlets were all, “Reddit made the right call this time.” While the suspect-identifying effort in /r/findbostonbombers produced negative results, many other contributors successfully aggregated information in /r/news and /r/worldnews for days (which I explore in later chapters). These extended efforts, in addition to the Aurora, Colorado shooting response, helped set the stage to motivate others to contribute to similar attempts in other developing situations. As mrgandw recounted, “That's what I got from the live threads of Aurora and the Boston Marathon and so forth: there's a lot of information that not necessarily every station is sharing. I think that was pretty helpful.” 100 While these experience may not determine the practices of gatekeeping for contributors to peer information aggregation, they do shape the ways that participants think about what is possible and what they should (or should not) do. Next, I explore the motivations expressed by contributors who decided to volunteer to aggregate information in response to developing events. Motivations for Contributing to News Aggregation on reddit Whether participants had many years of prior experience on reddit or not, each participant eventually became involved in some form of information aggregation in response to a developing event. The motivations of contributors to even begin volunteering play strongly into the network gatekeeping paradigm of alternatives, because their motivations generally reflected their recognition of reddit as a place where they – as ordinarily gated individuals – could contribute to information sharing practices. The entry points for participants varied, but motivations tended to revolve around individual-, audience-, and network-level perspectives, all of which embodied aspects of reddit as an alternative platform for information and news compared to other social media sites and journalistic organizations. Motivations to participate in peer production efforts tends to revolve around personal interest, similar attraction to goals of the project as other members, and recognition for contributions (Haythornthwaite, 2009). Motivation is usually defined by personal skill and expertise, and “giv[ing] according to your abilities” is a central tenet of contributors to peer production communities (Nov & Rao, 2008). On an information project like Wikipedia, intrinsic motivation is important, for personal fulfillment as well as conducting oneself in a manner that other members approve of (Yang & Lai, 2010). Similarly, those who participate in citizen journalism activities do so based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: centered in personal enjoyment on the one hand and obligation to inform a community on the other (Fröhlich, 101 Quiring, & Engesser, 2012). Interestingly, acting as an alternative to traditional journalism was also a common motivation for contributors (1057). Reddit participants showed similar concerns on the individual and community levels. Below, I break apart these motivations into three primary categories: individual motivations, related to the ability or desire to contribute; audience motivations, related to the reception of the potential contributions by imagined or actual readers; and network-level motivations, related to the value and purpose of contributing to a larger collective and community of people. Interested & Available While everyone interviewed participated in some form of information aggregation, every interview participant also expressed an invested interest in volunteering. While some participants did not expect to do the work from the beginning (or do it for so long in the end), everyone described positive, self-motivated reactions. The interest varied: participants described that they were intrigued due to the novelty of the event (“I'm pretty young. So I don't remember times that there has been this kind of huge protest or there has been this huge protest in the United States so I was kind of interested in that.”), a sustained fascination with social issues (“I guess you can kind of say I have an interest in law enforcement and terrorism...” or, “I mostly joined because of my interest in aviation.”), or even attraction to watching other people do this kind of work (“I thought this is pretty cool, this is different, so I sent him a PM offering my help and join the team and that's kind of where it all got started.”). A handful of people also self-identified as “news junkies,” meaning that they described themselves as spending time purposefully following news developments. The point of entry for different people varied, but routinely participants described the experience as unplanned and based strongly on coincidental timing. For example, Tony was a 102 three-year American participant on reddit. In response to an active shooter situation in San Diego, he described having “an interest in law enforcement and terrorism” and mentioned an app for tracking police scanners on his phone called Scanner Radio that “aggregates [scanner signals] so you can not only see what's available, but you can listen to it instantly.” When he sits at work or when driving, he will “open the app and… just listen in on it.” He explained that, at the time when he decided to participate, “I was already listening to the police scanner before I even saw this on reddit.” However, he said that when he noticed the information pop up on the webpage, “I didn't plan on doing it at any point. I didn't even plan on doing it until my fingers started typing and I had a couple entries in there.” Anthony, an American graduate student who had updated a lot of information after the Boston Marathon bombings, explained the randomness of the timing, after he happened to see a friend’s post on Facebook about the crisis: “Sheer luck, and quickness, I guess. … [I]t got to me so quickly. I was just in the right time, I guess, the right space.” The ability to do this work generally hinged on participants having free time: most contributors explained that they were at home or at work and were not burdened with other responsibilities at the time of the breaking news event. As a point of contrast, empw illustrated an assumption that, while people who aggregate during developing situations do it coincidentally, some people wait for developments like this to occur: A lot of times, it just happens to be somebody that was there at the time and brought what they had to the table and was recognized for it. At the same time, a lot of the time, it's because they're there… they're always there… they're hawks… That's their life. They refresh that all day long. That's a good way to get news and that's a good way to find out breaking news and that kind of thing... None of my participants described their own experience with news aggregation as sitting and waiting for something to happen, though a few of them explained that they had encountered the 103 developing event while browsing reddit, and the nature of reddit combining information about a variety of topics provided them the opportunity to find out about the news story. Participants also faced a number of difficulties with getting involved in aggregation at the start of the events to which they contributed. Most often, people cited the inability to contribute due to everyday obligations, like being at work, as the largest barrier to entry. In all cases, the availability of free time came down to having downtime at home (in the morning or evening), between classes, during slow days at work (or occupations that had flexible hours), or being sick or immobile (e.g., after surgery). The same issue of responsibilities was noted by participants when discussing stopping or the inability to do aggregation work again: people had to go back to work, return to class, or tend to personal needs – like eating food or going to sleep – after long hours of contributing. As one participant who had contributed to two different threads related to North Korean announcements about warfare described, “I didn't have that same availability later on, and [lack of time] just impacts the quality of my posts.” In some cases, participants spent a long time updating information related to a developing event, decided to stop, and then eventually returned to the post after more information was available to share. Occasionally people would return to updating or correcting information, though usually the event had died down by that time. In cases where the aggregation work continued for multiple days, the contributors coordinated particular schedules (and frequently, this coordination occurred with other reddit users in distant time zones, as I discuss further in Chapter 6). However, one contributor suggested that at a certain point, it is not practical to continue updating for so long, especially once the audience has slowly dissipated. 104 While participants mentioned interest in the topic or event and methods of entry into the aggregation tasks, they also pointed to specific reasons why they were motivated to contribute. Below, I explore three perspectives: individual, audience, and network. Individual Motivations Individual motivations shaped many participants’ reasons for contributing to information aggregation. In many cases, these motivations were related to the quality and scope of personal contributions. One of the largest individual motivations therefore was a sense that the participant could contribute something that others could not. Usually this perceived contribution split two ways: either the individual was physically located close to the event and felt they could contribute because they understood local context (or had linguistic experience, allowing them to translate), or the individual thought they were knowledgeable about the topic or had another type of expertise related to the information being shared. Local Expertise For people close to the event, local knowledge fueled interest in the event in addition to interest in reporting on it. Miller was a student from the southern United States, and he helped to aggregate information about a shooting in Charleston. His initial interest stemmed from his close proximity: “I have family that lives in Charleston so I was kind of interested in it from the beginning. I'd been following it basically since it broke. So that's kind of how I got into it.” He explained that, because he was local, he likely knew more about the finer details of what information was reported from sources and could contextualize it better than others farther away: “I guess it was the first or second press conference I decided to just make a summary of everything that was going on. … My family lives within 10 minutes of where this happened. I 105 felt like I had more knowledge than most other redditors about this area and maybe a little more insight on what was happening as a result.” Sometimes awareness of a location also helped in evaluating information, such as pictures. One participant who had lived in Turkey for over two decades told me that he felt motivated to contribute to information aggregation in reaction to a political uprising in his home country because he could recognize places and local information. He said, “I knew Ankara well, and I could maybe identify places from pictures because I was born and raised here. I've been here for 25 years or something like that. So I knew Ankara pretty well, and I trusted my judgment in that matter, but I don't know other cities just as well, so that's why I decided [to contribute].” This local knowledge also contributed to news judgment, such as whether or not the event was even worth considering. Peva3 described the importance of his involvement with a reported local shooting. He first noticed the crisis on the local news. He distinctly remembered “the shot from the TV” because “it was a ton of police officers converging in one place.” His experiences as a local tipped him off to this out of the ordinary occurrence: “I'm from the area and that doesn't happen unless there is something really really big happening, and even if it was gang violence or something like that, you would not see 10 officers in one place without something happening.” He felt motivated to aggregate information because he knew it would be a big story: “The idea that there were shots fired at the Naval Yard and that there was all these cops going there pretty much meant that there was some sort of big event that was happening.” Occasionally, people become interested in national or global news events, but the particular expertise granted by being local remains a crucial factor in how participants expressed their possible involvement in aggregation for something in their region. Cynthia compared her 106 comfort in having more awareness of local events than, say, a large event like the November 2015 Paris attacks: “I feel intimidated adding anything to the big stuff. Because with Paris I'm so far removed but in Los Angeles it's my area so I can speak somewhat more authoritatively to that.” Even though reddit operates on a scale of millions of potential contributors, the individual perspective of locality impacted particular individuals to volunteer, which may not have been applicable to all community members in any location. Translation For those who were local, linguistic fluency as a local expertise also played a significant role in motivating contributions during developing events. Even though spaces exist for non-English discussions, reddit’s membership is based in English-language conversations. Therefore, when they had non-English language fluency, participants described the role of translation as a primary motivating factor in their potential to contribute, as well as an important element in why they could contribute something original that anyone else around the world could not. Translation came in two forms: translation of local media coverage and translation of information produced by individuals (whether single citizens or other actors, like representatives of governments). Excelsior_i was a participant on reddit for five years and living in Pakistan. A moderator of the /r/Pakistan subreddit, he also had helped aggregate information about a major earthquake in Pakistan and India in October 2015. We talked about his role as a translator of local media when he decided to include information from local citizens and media organizations. He told me, “I think most of the people there that were on the ground were local and that ended up contributing most of the news.” He felt motivated to contribute information like this, because it was slower and easier for him to make an impact: “If it's international news [that reports on the event] then it will definitely be on Reddit faster than I can put it. But if it's local news then I can 107 be the one to post it.” He especially underlined the importance of translation on reddit, because in many cases, there are always local individuals or media that do not share news in English, and these sources can be helpful to share with readers. He explained, “I think that particularly there are issues with regards to language... because even though Pakistan has a significantly high percentage of people that are speaking English, there is at least some percentage of news that is being in local language. And that ends up contributing [to coverage on reddit].” Especially when people who can translate arrive quickly, according to excelsior_i, they have the ability to beat out international news organizations, who might not have a local correspondent in the region. Thus, in his mind, translation interacted with speed, a value discussed earlier that played into motivation even more: “There are some events… if they are being covered by international newspapers, like the New York Times or The Independent… They are actually a bit late, I would say, in terms of reporting the details. Because for me, people are on the ground, and I'm directly in touch with them. So that's why I can be much faster.” Being local and being able to translate local media provided perspective that the contributor could use to frame their summaries of information from a variety of sources, and in particular know which local sources to rely on (and which to take with a grain of salt). For instance, a participant in Indonesia noted to me that, after the Air Asia Flight 8501 crash in January 2015, he was able to make particular judgments about local sources based on his knowledge and experience of how they operated: I lived in Jakarta at the time, and I used to live in Surabaya, which is where the plane took off from. At the time I lived in Jakarta, a lot of the investigation efforts were out of the Indonesian capital, and a lot of the search and rescue agencies were based there. So I had some perspective as to how the Indonesian government agencies work and where to look for information in the local news and all that. 108 He continued, saying – as I mentioned above – that by having access to local media and knowing enough of the language, he provided a balance of different sources, mixing in the local ones with others from around the world: [The articles about the event] were coming out really slowly, and a lot of them were Indonesian language news, which I'm not fluent in it, but I can understand enough of it. That's one thing, where information is coming out… from a lot of different places, I thought it'd be good to have – for people that are coming to this subreddit to look for information – it'd be good for them. Similarly, Raz – a Romanian user who had aggregated information about a fire in Romania, his home country – explained that providing different sources, especially local media, meant that readers didn’t have to rely on large news organizations for international news, and it allowed people to see what the local conversation looked like regarding the event: I'm from Romania. So I could read, kind of, not original sources, but close to original sources, Romania news, and I could see what they say back there. If there's something happening in China or another country where they speak different languages, I have to depend on translations from like ABC, or CNN, and there's a lot of stuff that gets lost in translation sometimes. Participants also noted that speed remained a factor when taking into account local expertise and information. However, these mentions were inflected with attention to access to local information in the original language in addition to speed of broadcasting from organizations. De-facto-idiot, a Malaysian redditor of three years, played a strong, supportive role when aggregating information related to the disappearance of MH370 in March 2014. Working with a counterpart in the United States, he helped provide information quickly from Malaysian media and experts: I’m a Malaysian myself so I can understand how Malaysian press conference. I try to do transcribe the press conference whenever I hear it. … I think is for this incident I think I have a lot of advantage in that. There's a lot of coverage in Chinese and Malaysia, I guess is happening in our country so I had the advantage of getting [it] first… 109 He stated his assumption that because he was local, he would be able to translate the information immediately, whereas journalists in organizations would rely on slower means: “I mean like let's say BBC, they have to go and get translat[ions of] official transcripts from the government and all that. I have the advantage. I can provide this information pretty quickly compared to foreign journalists. This is the advantage.” Local Coverage As one especially personal motivation, some participants expressed that their interest in aggregating information about a local event was related to their desire for more and better coverage of local affairs. Raz, from Romania, had participated in reddit’s community for only a year, but he told me that due to the preferences of most of reddit (i.e., English-language material, and dependent on what organizations tend to cover as international stories), he perceived many people didn’t know about current events in his home country. He told me he was motivated to provide access to local sources unfamiliar to other reddit users, saying, “It was something that happened in my home country, so I instantly became interested in why it happened. I wanted to share what I knew and what I was reading on Romania news to people on reddit that don't read it. I kind of translated Romanian to English and here's what the media's saying there. I could read it because I'm Romanian.” Similarly, another young student in France, LolNaie1, who had been involved in the aggregation of information related to a hostage situation in a Paris postal office, highlighted that there seemed to be little coverage of France outside of specific regional subreddits. He mentioned that he went to local sources first, claiming, “I had better information, and I had an opportunity to like speak about it and get the news quicker, than many other Reddit users because it was French. It was the French news I did, before the international news.” He then 110 expanded his personal motivation to emphasize that a local person who spoke French might be better to participate: “As I said, there’s not many French people on Reddit, so I thought it would be better if it was someone French who would do it.” However, he had encountered people that pushed back against his translated information, even though he argued that his local experiences allowed him to better understand the best places to go: “[B]ut there was English people trying to question my translation from French articles. … Since I’m French, I pretty much know what is the proper news source and what isn’t.” By participating, he also expressed that part of his motivation was to broaden the participation of people like himself, saying, “I think it’s a good opportunity to better the reputation of French people on this website.” Occasionally, participants also mentioned local expertise as criteria when judging if they would participate in another breaking news event in the future. Miller had aggregated information for a local event, and he explained, “[I]f something local happened, and I had the time, I would definitely consider doing this again.” Peva3, who did similar local work in another part of the U.S., explained that he was the “right person” because he was in the area where the event occurred (and, as he explained before, his knowledge of the area helped him understand the finer details). For any future contributions, he claimed he would be motivated particularly if it were local: I think the really valuable thing was I was in the area at the time that it happened. For me, that is almost more valuable than having CNN open on one screen and BBC on the other, and Twitter. Anyone can do that. I think it is more that I am the right person at the right time. If there was something that happened where I am now, sure, I might do it again, especially if I had the time. It definitely would have to be local to me. Topical Expertise Perceived expertise and the ability to contribute something that nobody else could remained important for multiple contributors. While local and linguistic expertise played that role for 111 some, others were motivated by curating other types of information: when not related to physical location, frequently these personal motivations related to either information expertise or the inclusion of unique sources. Theearthquakeguy created his natural disaster response account three years ago, and over time, he has reacted quickly after earthquakes to provide aggregated, summarized information about them. He has gained such a reputation for fast contributions that many people message him immediately when an earthquake has occurred. Reflecting on his motivation to create the account, he explained to me that he had some expertise when it came to earthquakes: “[I]t's my third account that came about… when there was a big earthquake in – I believe it was – Chile or Iran. And I just figured that I had a bit of perspective that maybe other people didn't have. So I figured I'd create a novelty account and just help out there.” He told me that he has a system of emails and notifications that allow him to stay on top of new earthquakes right after they happen. Because he had a system in place, he felt motivated to respond to these natural events, because he saw a gap in quality of information posted when one occurred. Eventually, he branched out to other types of developing events, like a chemical explosion in Waco, Texas. Remembering his first inspiration to participate in aggregation work around that event, he told me: As soon as one of these events happened back then, it was kind of like, “Okay, is there a live comment? Is there anything being updated?” … [T]here was, but it wasn't actually being updated with the information that needed to be updated. I kind of rationalized that I did have some sort of legitimacy through the earthquake service, so I thought, “Okay. Let's try and provide a service here. In his contribution, he went on to provide information like “hotlines, details, and… blood drives” (see Figure 4 below). 112 Figure 4. A detailed comment thread, split into three images, by theearthquakeguy in response to an explosion in Waco, Texas. 113 Unique Information More often than expertise in a particular topic, people mentioned that they were motivated to aggregate because they wanted to provide a range of unique information sources. When collecting information about a hostage situation in a hotel in Mali, TeoLolstoy, the journalist from Switzerland, told me that he had found some particularly good sources of information: “I think that I had some good sources. A local news site from Mali… it was a pretty good news site, and they posted pictures all the time on Facebook and so on and so on. That's why I thought I have some sources that other people haven't so I should contribute.” When considering the Boston Marathon bombing response, empw also felt motivated to contribute information from unique sources; he asked, “What can I tell people that they haven't seen elsewhere? What can I bring to the table that can help these people and that can help?” In other cases, participants were motivated because they had the opportunity to contribute original media that they uploaded themselves. Emily, a volunteer moderator for the /r/sandy subreddit in October 2013, described how she felt that the activity in her subreddit (which focused on information and media about Hurricane Sandy) was successful because participants were motivated to contribute original media: “We had photos and information that nobody else in the media had, and we were able to disseminate that to the people who needed it most, in an appropriate, timely fashion. It got the job done.” The inclusion of unique sources also reframed the developing event and, potentially, audiences’ perceptions of the news, motivating contributors to share information beyond the “big events” that tend to make national or global news stories. In Pakistan, excelsior_i explained that he felt more motivated to keep contributing local information, because he might be in touch with the people actually involved: “As for small news or small events… if it's something uniquely 114 positioned, like for example I'm personally in touch with some people who are doing something educational, or are doing something helpful for the community, then I post that.” Lack of Motivation Participants occasionally identified limitations related to these individual motivations that influenced them to not contribute. Usually, interviewees stated reasons related to the originality or quality of perceived contributions, though it may also have been influenced by lack of expertise or skill. For example, one redditor of five years joined a live thread to report on an aviation-related event but did not ultimately contribute anything. He stated that his lack of contributions stemmed from a perceived absence of anything original to add compared to those of other participants, explaining, “I was in the middle of work and I didn't have any news that would be a fresh angle or anything that wasn’t really posted there already.” Judging what is a proper story also played a role in non-participation. For example, EpicBadass, an older participant from the northwestern United States (and three-year redditor), had participated in a short aggregation thread about a shooting at a local high school. When considering if he would do similar work in the future, he paused, and claimed, “I just haven't seen anything really that newsworthy I feel like that has warranted a post.” Alphaque, from New Zealand, described his lack of motivation in opposition to journalists who did this on a daily basis; instead, he affirmed that his participation in aggregation was merely a one-time occurrence: “I don't know. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a reporter. This was a one-off thing...” Naly_d, who had participated in about half a dozen aggregation collaborations, believed he had a sense that once people do the work, they find it’s not for them. He highlighted the volunteer quality of peer information product: “[P]eople can bow out if they aren't interested or don't feel 115 that it's right for them, and that's the thing that I would hope that the community would realize… is that they have no obligation to continue updating.” Audience Motivations The second set of motivations arose from the relationship between individuals that do peer information aggregation and their potential, imagined, or realized audiences. Two trends appeared in relation to motivations about audiences: 1) that the individuals were doing aggregation work for themselves to begin with, so they considered the product of their effort to be of additional value to an imagined audience (and that there were few to no barriers to sharing the collected information); and 2) that after starting the aggregation, the participants realized there were some amount of people (a realized, actual audience) responding with feedback about the work. There were also discussions about an invisible audience that was assumed to be present but provided no feedback (such as people who interacted with the information by only reading without contributing, via lurking). As I described above, in peer production communities like Wikipedia or open-source software, participants are motivated by participating in a project that will be sustained and utilized by other people. A similar awareness occurs on reddit. However, it should be noted that participation on reddit isn’t centered around a predefined project, product, or outcome. Instead, the work of information aggregation in developing situations relates to a contribution to a perceived public good: an immediate, usually temporary, information resource for audiences. In some cases, the perceived contribution didn’t manifest until participants had begun finding sources and collecting information to inform their own understanding of the event. Interviewees said that once this process started, there were then few barriers to entry for sharing that information to a wider audience. When Miller began watching the first few press 116 conferences about an active shooting in Charleston, he said he began to make a summary of what was going on. He recounted to me, “I just decided that, since I was following it and kind of wanted a timeline for myself, I just posted it.” Once he made it more organized, he felt motivated to keep working on it. “This is a good lot of information that needs to be shared… And I figured I'd go ahead and do it since I had already started to do it in a disorganized manner. Then I organized it after I realized I should probably just keep it going.” Another interviewee, who declared himself a “news junkie,” was following a political upheaval in Thailand and figured he might as well post the updates he was compiling: “Well, I don't have anything better to do… so I figure, while I'm doing it, I might as well just post the updates.” Imagined Audiences When participants described the value of providing these updates on reddit, they often mentioned an imagined audience that would read and benefit from the information. One of mrgandw’s motivations for providing updates about the MH370 plane’s disappearance was a sense that others might be just as curious as he was about the information he had found. He recounted: [I]t really caught my attention. I was just as curious as anyone else, if not more so, in what happened to that plane. What I started doing was I started going to breaking news sites. They had live feeds and that sort of thing, so I would just refresh the page every ten seconds and see what came up. Then I felt like, “Hey, there's a lot of this information that's coming in in real time that not everyone is going to know about, and I know that there are people out there as curious as I am and a lot of them who were affected by this as well.” In his eyes, by providing the information openly to the reddit community, at least one person in his imagined audience could benefit from his contribution. “I figured, ‘All right. Let me just start a rolling list of what's going on and hopefully this helps someone.’” In some cases, participants’ imagined audience became a realized audience, as they began to receive responses from viewers. When a council in the UN made a major announcement about 117 their interactions with Libya, a contributor from Scandinavia figured that, because he was following the situation anyway, he could provide updates on reddit. He said, “Basically, I was sitting there; I didn't have much else to do. I was following this situation anyways, so I figured that ... Well, first of all, submitting the link to a live stream from [the UN] isn't very exciting, so I figured that I could just write a little bit about what happened, because the normal news media were quite slow in getting this out.” Unexpectedly, he received responses from other users on reddit in the form of comments and upvotes. His response then was to continue aggregating information: “There was a lot of activity around it, and it gathered some response, so I figured, “Okay, this is going to be my night now. I'll just sit and help people get some updates, I guess.” Since I was digging through things and trying to read as much as possible on this anyway, then I might as well share it with other people if it helps them.” Emergent Audiences For some participants, like those in the last section, the motivation to contribute stemmed from the perception of an audience that would find the shared information useful. In other cases, participants contributed to the task because they saw evidence of an actualized audience with manifested needs. In general, participants noted a consistent sense that other reddit users who browse the site would pay attention to potential contributions. Drawing from personal experiences of finding information on reddit, participants described the potential audience as experiencing the same thing. For instance, EpicBadass narrated his morning, seeing “cop cars everywhere… flying north… so it's like I knew something was up.” He explained how he continued to post because of the expectation that others wanted to see the same information he was seeking out: “I was really curious to hear what was happening, and so I was constantly looking for information. As I found 118 stuff, it's like, I'll just update the post because I knew obviously others were looking for it.” He described it as obvious because he was “getting an insane amount of comments” from other users in response to his aggregated updates. When an audience clearly emerged, it occurred in response to a participant’s own initial contribution (motivating them to continue for a long time afterward) or on another’s contribution (motivating them to participate in the maintenance and continuation of the respective post, comment, or live thread). The perception that an audience exists was expressed by many participants as related to reddit’s platform and interface, indicated specifically by voting or commenting traces. These markers – especially rapid increases in them – served as a primary motivation for doing aggregation work. Participants expressed their awareness of audiences based on these markers in various ways. By far, the primary point of contact with an audience occurred through upvotes. While a gain in commenters were noted on occasion as an indication of people reading, if a contributor posted something and the score number began to increase, the contributor gained immediate feedback (provided by a low-barrier, one-click method) that suggested that what they had posted was accepted by the actual viewing audience. Icwangtw – from Taiwan and active on reddit for five years – put it simply based on his long experience in the community: “[W]hen you're writing stuff on here, you know that people are going to read it and can tell by the upvotes…” Another interviewee described the direct connection of his motivation to the upvotes he received and his audience’s feelings, saying, “The fact it was being upvoted motivated me to keep on doing it… In that sense, people felt it was worth being the top comment.” 119 Audience perception even appeared to motivate better contributions. For example, when Tony was considering his experience updating about the active shooter situation in San Diego, he reflected, “I guess it does kind of impact my motivation a little bit if I know more people are going to see it. … I guess I would say I'm more likely to comment on something if I know people are going to see it. I'm probably more likely to just make sure that my facts are correct, maybe even fact check myself.” Compared to other platforms, icwangtw described upvoting and other forms of audience feedback as a benefit for further motivations: “[I]t's like shouting into a void. … You get replies, and you get upvotes, and you get gold 66 and all that. So you know other people are responding or reading. I think that's a big difference.” While upvotes by and far were the most commonly cited motivation, comments were also mentioned occasionally. When mrgandw was updating after the MH370 disappearance, he explained that some of the comments he received were related to more information he should post, but a few actually were emotional tokens of thanks, which really inspired him to keep at the aggregation task: I felt like I was definitely helping out. It really felt good at the end of the day because I would get messages from actual Malaysians and so forth saying, “Hey, man. I knew friends and family affected by this disappearance, so you're giving us a lot of stuff that are country's withholding from us and it's really helping us out.” That right there is the reason why it felt worth it. Sometimes, explicit audience feedback motivated contributors to move to specific spaces within reddit’s network to continue their updating. Another interviewee, who had been aggregating information about an airplane that crashed at San Francisco International Airport, had decided to contribute continually back and forth between two comments in the /r/news and /r/worldnews subreddits. When we looked at both during the interview, he told me that he was motivated to 66 Individuals can purchase “reddit gold” to award to other users for good contributions across the platform. 120 switch to updating only one post because it ultimately had gained more upvotes, signifying that “more people were visiting it” and it had “a larger presence.” Similarly, one contributor to the aggregation of information in response to the November 2015 Paris attacks, MaximaxII (a young student from Switzerland), had worked on multiple, simultaneous live threads. Like the prior example, eventually he decided to switch to only one, because, as he said, “More people were watching it. It was more active… I actually sent a PM to all the other contributors and told them that they should join the other one. I was trying to unite them into one. Not necessarily because I wanted more people to see me.” However, he knew that more people were paying attention primarily to one of the live threads, because moderators had worked together to make it the most visible of the various ones that were created (I explore the details of this decision later in Chapter 7). In cases where interviewees had collaborated with another user on the information aggregation task, the person who started and gained traction – and therefore gained the initial audience – provided a reason to continue or improve the work. Martin, a Norwegian graduate student and three-year member of reddit, had been one of the first to aggregate information in comments in reaction to the November 2015 Paris attacks. He told me that earlier contributors had posted information that motivated him to create a higher quality submission. He explained, “They didn't really have any coherent information. … They all had very slightly confusing and not very coherent messages, so for that particular post, basically [I] just corrected what I found through various news outlets into that comment, just in case some people would want to read a more time-lined type of thing updated.” 121 Responding to Audience Needs In some cases, participants described a responsibility to the audiences that found their information aggregation, motivating the contributors to continue searching for and posting updates. One part of that responsibility stemmed from the speed of the manifested audience’s feedback. When JP was aggregating information in response to the Boston Marathon bombings, he noted a massive and quick influx of reactions from other people. He received so many markers of his emergent audience that he assumed a duty to continue: I specifically remember I made a thread, and I put one update in it, and I refreshed the page. The thread was not even live for three minutes, and it had over 10,000 upvotes. That's the fastest I've ever seen a thread get that many upvotes. It was crazy. That's what cemented the moment where I was like, “I’m in too deep, but I can't stop. I have to keep doing this updating thing,” just because of how quickly that happened. A related piece of audience motivation stemmed from the perceived need by those audiences for continual information updates. For instance, when mrgandw had realized how many people were paying attention to his updates, he believed he had to follow through for them. He said, “I felt like I had a responsibility to deliver updates as we got them because I didn't want to leave people waiting for news, and I didn't want to seem like I was being complacent, just being too lazy to update.” When he was updating information after the Boston bombings, Anthony explained a similar motivation around responsibility to his audience. After hours and hours of contributing information, he felt overwhelmed, tired, and eventually had to quit; however, he considered himself accountable for the updates, and he decided he needed to try to find someone else to continue them. He concluded, “There's not going to be a million people, 3 million people, that have been watching this that are suddenly going to be left in the dark.” Others clarified further that, if they were to contribute information during a developing event, then it could potentially help someone. One contributor recounted that while he could 122 have not contributed, he might as well because of that vast number of possible readers: “I don't need to be helping with anything. … The only reason why I did this was because I didn't see it being done… I definitely thought people would like appreciate knowing that stuff…” The low barriers to helping contribute even a bit of information to this large, invisible audience inspired people that felt like they belonged to a shared resource of information: “I feel like I'd been part of the community, and this is something I could give back, I guess. … I thought this would be a good chance. So why not?” Lack of Motivation However, just as with individual motivations, audience-driven motivations also were described as limited by negative audience feedback. For example, kash_if was an Indian native who said he had been on reddit for eight years. When we talked about his participation on reddit and motivation to contribute to aggregation for an event, he made it clear that he likely would not contribute if his contribution “got a lot of downvotes.” To him, upvotes equated to an interested audience. When updating shortly after Gaddafi was captured in Libya, he clarified that “I would have probably stopped updating [during the event], but [my post] stayed in the plus side of the upvotes, so I guess at least a few people got something useful out of it.” Not getting enough upvotes from a potential audience was also a cause for concern, and getting “traction” or just enough positive votes became enough encouragement to continue. As with timing explained as a factor for participation, it also related strongly to the limitations around audience motivations. In many people’s eyes, timing correlated to voting – if you were first, you had a higher likelihood of getting more votes – and voting of course ties in with visibility and how many people will see any particular contribution. For instance, empw claimed, “It's all about timing. The only reason that I'm even findable here [by readers] is 123 because I was there at the beginning.” Another interviewee concluded, “[T]iming also cannot be underestimated. If you do this in the morning or early afternoon, you're going to get a lot more eyeballs on your article than any other time of the day.” Network Motivations The third prominent type of motivation for participating in the aggregation of information during developing events was network-related motivations. I distinguish audience motivations from network motivations, because the former (audience) focuses specifically on potential and actual readers of aggregated information, whereas the latter (network) focuses on the impact that the collective identity (B. Anderson, 1991; Henry Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, Kligler- Vilenchik, & Zimmerman, 2016) of redditors as a community has within the networked affordances of reddit as a platform. Reddit exists as a network of subcommunities linked through a shared platform with infused community norms. But there are two other applications of “networks” when we talk about reddit. First, reddit exists as a wider network of social communication infrastructure with far-reaching network effects. In other words, because the audiences of users on reddit remain so large, a much wider, diverse range of people could potentially interact with each other. And second, reddit – through the aggregation practices of its volunteer information workers – becomes a network hub of multiple links across the wider internet (since its user base establishes connections to a massive web of other sites through the submission of various URLs). This means that people make reddit into a central hub in the larger network of the Web. For community members, that central position feels inspirational. As empw put it, “It was just this crazy feeling of all these people across the globe are here. It's like a beating heart. Everybody is there. Not everybody, of course, but hundreds of millions of people. It's unbelievable.” In other 124 words, the collective of participants on reddit have position in the larger ecosystem of information producers, drawn by a sort of platform-driven identity. Unlike a news organization that creates news products (stories, articles, reports, etc.), reddit as a networked platform constitutes a collaborative effort toward a public good. Network motivations fall under three basic assumptions. First, because the possible audience that reads reddit’s content is so large, potentially anyone (particularly those with specific expertise in a topic) can contribute relevant information. This potential is especially pertinent for people who are “on the ground” during developing events. Second, there is such a wide range of information available on the internet that aggregating participants must act as filters for that information. And third, there is a larger community identity with its own norms and practices that pervades reddit’s platform. Even though each subcommunity shapes its own rules and norms, participants on reddit combine their experiences across communities on the same platform to form a type of collective identity (which some might describe as being a “redditor”; A. L. Massanari, 2015). The motivations related to these network attributes focus on the broad role that reddit plays as a network: people want to help out to give back to the community, but potentially anybody could be doing this work, even though the vast amount of information makes the work particularly difficult. Network motivations therefore frame reddit as a valid and valuable source of information that has connections all around the globe, because such far reaching connections lead to so many different people working together on various problems. The network perspective provides a foundation for expectations based on the large network of potential contributors and community members: a dimension that other network gatekeeping situations don’t necessarily depend on. 125 Expectations for Additional Participants The most commonly cited network-related incentive to participation was the breadth of reddit’s social network. The growth of the platform over the last decade has resulted in a far-reaching network of pseudonymous strangers that might become activated at any time to share expertise about a particular topic. Reddit in a sense lives up to its slogan as the “front page of the internet,” both in the sense of broadcasting information (like the front page of a newspaper) as well as a “front end” (as one former reddit administrator explained) for accessing many parts of the internet in one spot, collecting millions of viewers every year to the community’s filtered content. As this administrator illustrated when talking about reddit’s reach: Popularity and accessibility plays a large role, because you know that – whatever the subject is – there's going to be a subreddit for it… whatever happens in the world or in sports or in whatever, there's going to be discussion about it minutes after it happens. … I think that a lot of people go to Reddit, especially when there's breaking or other news and stuff to get out, because we're that kind of “front end.” The broad nature of reddit’s network meant that anyone could participate to share updates, including people “on the ground” during developing events. Connecting with a large network meant that anyone, essentially, could contribute information, and this perception became a strong assumption across reddit’s community. Reflecting on how other contributors react to emergent events and crises, mrgandw claimed that people who experience these situations pop up on reddit to react in the same moment: For news, a lot of breaking news and so forth, I actually see it on the front page more than anything else… [W]hat is truly, I think, amazing about Reddit is that you have people who are actually there in the moment, not like paid journalists. … You have real people who are in the comments and actually sharing their experiences firsthand. I think that's incredible. In general, participants identified a pervasive expectation that someone would contribute information about an important event eventually. A common occurrence was the appearance of 126 multiple submissions about the same event from a variety of sources within the first few minutes. Ctaggie described his impression that anything he had contributed would suddenly appear shortly afterward, and this presumption applied to all developing stories: “[A]ny breaking news that I would immediately post, someone else would post maybe a minute later. Although it might not be as immediate… but it would eventually get out to Reddit at some point.” Especially in cases where the ongoing event might be considered “major” (which I explore in more detail in another section below), the expectation of volunteers increased. BlatantConservative, a younger American and five-year participant on reddit, said he felt like whenever a notable event occurred, people would always step up to the plate: “I've never had a case where nobody was available. There is always volunteers especially when it gets big like when there's a lot of people watching. There's always people who want to help out.” Participants’ awareness of this network and its effects motivated some participants to eventually contribute, because they sensed that they could be the person to be there in the moment to help. Joke-away was another American contributor to the Boston Marathon bombing update threads, and when he thought about his motivation to participate in aggregating information after that event, he highlighted that he was the one – of many – to step in and help out: “[W]hen I think about it in retrospect, it was just like, ‘This is something that nobody has done in this thread yet and probably somebody's going to do it, so I will do it.’” People expressed the realization that they were the one individual, out of thousands, that had contributed. When Anthony had contributed to the Boston Marathon update threads, he realized that someone else from the community could have likely participated. “I could have been anybody else. I was just lucky enough to post the very first thread. There were probably 1,000 other people that would 127 have posted it. It probably would have gone the same way, regardless, in my opinion. This was very driven by the community.” Still, the potential massive audience of reddit’s networked community became a narcissistic motivator sometimes. Ctaggie happened to be one of the contributors to a live thread for aggregating information about the San Bernadino shootings in December 2015. Like others previously mentioned, he also felt that many people appeared from the woodwork to volunteer: Reddit's an online community. Someone [is] guaranteed to step up. I had tons of people offering to step up and join the thread. In fact, I had to decline a lot of offers from people to be contributors to the thread. I didn't have to do it and someone else guaranteed would have done it, so I guess [there’s] that feeling like, “Oh, I did something no one else could, or, “I gave back to the community somehow.” The motivation he cited, though, was much more driven by an assumed vanity. When I asked why he thought that so many people from reddit’s wider network, including himself, would also volunteer to contribute at any given time, he said: I'm going to be honest with you: it's a feeling of importance. I mean, when people know your name… like, when I started getting referenced in comments, and my username starts getting thrown around… (I'd gained a decent amount of credibility at that point…) … There's a feeling of importance of being able to contribute to 6,000 people reading what you're saying. That's something I suspect is the reason for people trying to get involved and become contributors. I'll be totally honest, it's part of the reason I did it too. It was enjoyable being the guy that 6,000 people are reading. Interestingly, while people expected potentially anyone to be part of the wider reddit community network, some participants voiced that they were demotivated to contribute because of the opportunity for specific people with greater expertise to appear. Mikaela was a redditor from New Zealand who had been participating on the site for four years and had participanted briefly in the live thread aggregating information about the Air Asia 8501 crash. She explained that in some situations, she will not contribute because they might have more knowledge about a particular topic than herself: “If I feel like I've got something to contribute, then I will. On 128 Reddit, there are so many users and so many people who seem to know more about events and topics than I do… I usually… just try [to] read and learn from them.” Too Much Information One of the dominant themes that emerged from participant interviews was aggregation work taking advantage of the hypernetworked, contemporary Web. While the core purpose of reddit is to aggregate links around specific topics, individuals that collected information during developing events utilized reddit’s platform as a central hub for disparate links from a multitude of different sources. The deluge of information produced during developing events prompted participants to reflect on the difficulty of dealing with their role as central nodes in a large information network. One motivation to contribute was to help sort through the flood of information from this diverse network of links. When he first started watching the information come in after the November 2015 Paris attacks, Martin in Norway said that he kept tabs open for dozens of websites, from news organizations to searches, from Twitter streams to reddit threads, and various live video feeds from the BBC and other local news sources. Overwhelmed, he considered it a mess of information: “I was sitting so far with the computer open and seeing a lot of the – I wouldn't say incoherent but… a mess of information, and if I was able to make sense of the information for myself, I would probably post it to one of these threads.” The motivation to contribute also stems from the impression of reddit as a space where people can find filtered information. As TeoLolstoy explained to me, it can be hard to sort out the information, but it is easier to do with the structure of reddit’s platform compared to another like Twitter: I think that [a] main benefit of reddit is that… it's a lot easier to find good sources. Especially with a big news event. For example, [the] Paris attacks… I mean, how are you going to find some credible source in those hundreds and thousands of tweets? I think it 129 was 120 tweets per second or something like that. Twitter is a big chaos. Reddit is also kind of a mess, but if you organize it your way, then it's not. However, the sheer amount of information sometimes meant that potential participants decided not to contribute. For example, one user claimed that – when choosing to participate in a handful of different live update threads – he did not want to join one because the current contributors were “better” and “pretty fast,” while the other one that he did end up contributing to seemed to need help. Further, some contributors are wary about “doubling up” when there are already people across the network updating information, since it would be redundant and unnecessary. Reddit as a Community “News Source” The community aspect of reddit remains a core driver of participation across the platform, whether it is in relation to the feeling of community membership that some users feel or the variety of discussions and conversations that emerge from a broader sense of the community as a public. Though it might be argued that reddit consists of many online communities linked together at a technical level by the site’s platform, there is also the sense that reddit as a whole is a distinct community with particular demographics, norms, and ideologies. Quite often, people stated that they wanted to “give back” to this community in a variety of ways. First, some people expressed a motivation to contribute because they had gotten so much beneficial information from other people in the reddit community in the past. TeoLolstoy had been a member for about five years, and he explained that as a journalist he has used reddit as a way to get information personally and professionally: “I want to give back because I use those live threads to also get information. I also retrieve information from them that I could further use in my reporting. That's kind of my way of giving back, because I don't only want to take information but I also want to give information… if I can afford it during my work time, then why shouldn't I help?” Similarly, ctaggie had been a reader and participant for three years, and 130 he recalled the prior benefits he had received from his daily use of reddit, saying how his sense of giving back motivated his contribution: “I was purely a volunteer, but I'd gotten so much out of Reddit, and I'd watched other live threads, I guess I thought I was giving back to the Reddit community somehow.” Participants’ perception of reddit as a news source also contributed to motivations related to the larger reddit network. While a widespread community was perceived by some people, it was the role that news-related information played specifically for that networked community on reddit that inspired them to contribute. The assumption that the larger, global network of reddit users allowed people local to events to provide information about them impacted network-level motivations. For example, Miller’s local knowledge about Charleston and aggregating information about a shooting there meant that he encountered a number of people who said they were nearby locals. He explained that the large network of people on reddit resulted in the chance that updates could come from anywhere “on the ground.” He said, “I think it's a pretty important function of reddit, being able to be involved with news stories that are breaking. Reddit's so big that it's common that someone close to the story is able to update everyone else on what's happening, like on the ground.” Further, participants recognized that reddit had taken on the role of a primary news source for many within reddit’s community, and one reason for that was due to the network’s ability to touch news at a global level, broadcasting it like mainstream media. Alphaque in New Zealand clarified how the scale and scope of the platform allows news to gain its reach: “I use Reddit for my news so for me, that's where I get most of my news. … I think it covers almost everything. [It is that way because of] the number of users they have and how quickly the news 131 gets posted, how quickly it gets uploaded to the front page. It's just purely down to the number of users they have from the site.” News Values While motivations were one factor that affected how people thought about their involvement in peer information aggregation, another critical element was news values. These values are important to understanding how contributors chose what information to share. Also, these values help us understand how reddit exists as an alternative to ordinary news reporting, because the values of peer information aggregation participants resemble but differ from those of journalists. News values generally relate to how journalists perceive what qualifies as news, helping news workers to judge and select information as valid in the production of news content (Wahl- Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009). Because news is socially constructed (Molotch & Lester, 1974; Tuchman, 1978), the values of its creators heavily shape the final product. More recently, news values have been applied to non-journalists to understand how similar or competing values arise in the construction of news and information flows in new media systems. On Twitter, for instance, participants value instantaneous information, the promotion of elites (media organizations or highly-connected users), a mixing of news reporting with expressions of solidarity (“so much so that it became difficult to separate factual reports from expressions of camaraderie” [275]), and the ambiance of a “live and lively environment” (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). In peer information aggregation, participants must navigate a set of competing interests that draw from the above principles. In essence, participants “have internalized traditional media’s standards for newsworthiness and actively strive to emulate them” while at the same time they “place a priority on determining and satisfying minute-to-minute audience demands for 132 content on particular subjects, and being the first to do so” (Coddington, 2015, 139). Coddington’s research focused on employees of journalistic organizations that conduct news aggregation; in the case of reddit, participants act in similar ways, but it is possible that their understanding of journalistic standards is more distant than in Coddington’s case, due to their lack of experience. This possibility does resemble Coddington’s additional provocation that “aggregators ultimately must fall back on a personalized and professionalized news judgment that relies on a ‘gut feeling’ and ‘what interests me as a person’ more than anything else…” (141), similar to what journalists encounter in their daily work (I. Schultz, 2007). While reddit may be considered an alternative to other forms of information gatekeeping, volunteers doing gatekeeping work through peer information aggregation may encounter the same approaches to news values as participants involved in journalistic processes. In this section, I examine the values that participants discussed when thinking about the events that reported on and the goals they had in mind when contributing certain kinds of information. And second, I discuss the impact of experience – whether related to prior knowledge of platform and norms or the application of (or lack of) journalistic skills – on how people report on news. Two primary dimensions emerged when participants discussed how news values impacted their potential work: their perception of the size of a story along with its subsequent importance, and their desire to frame any information shared in factual terms while avoiding misinformation and bias. These factors interacted to shape participants’ perspectives on the role of sourcing and verification when conducting breaking news information aggregation. While they also contributed to the sense of reddit as an alternative to traditional gatekeeping, these factors mirror the trends of other platforms and news organizations, complicating the idea that reddit was a strong alternative (as illustrated in earlier sections) and even highlighting 133 certain dependencies for information produced by journalists. In our conversation about his professional journalism experience, a complaint from naly_d illustrated this apparent contradiction well: “People shit all over mainstream media and then rely on them as soon as it's convenient because… that's the way everyone has been. People talk about it now as it's a new thing, while media is always focused or has only just started focusing on celebrity news and that sort of stuff. That's the way news has always been.” The Perceived Size of Developing Events Detecting Size from Established Reporting Speed and volume of a breaking news event remained a major factor in what constituted a development event to be newsworthy, though these were usually defined in relation to the rapid activity around and diffusion of information from both professional organizations and online social networks. These factors formed a certain expected type of response from mainstream media professionals, such as scattered reporting, constant coverage, and immediacy to verify information for the organizations’ audiences. Generally, in moments of uncertainty, professional reporters frequently gatekeep the news because they are the first ones to put together a verified, consistent narrative. Volunteers on reddit can do similar work, but they do so in relation to how the mainstream media does it. As one participant explained, talking about how he went about verifying information: You can say in a way that we are gatekeeping, or you can put it various ways like we try to filter whatever [comes from a] news desk ... I think some commenters did question our motivation in doing all this, probably we have a bias against all this things, but the story here is that we are just trying to select the news like this. We ourselves are not a news outlet, right? We don’t have men on the ground, so we just take whatever we read in the mainstream news, and we just filter it. 134 Throughout this chapter, I have referred to reddit as a supplement for or extension to mainstream media news sources. However, when participants discussed what drew them to a particular event, they regularly referred to a central role that professional news organizations play in defining what they should pay attention to. One way participants expressed newsworthiness was in relation to how mainstream news organizations reported on events. However, they specifically referred to the speed of professional journalists’ reactions to breaking events and the perceived “size” of these stories crafted by professional organizations. While some participants – as I explained in the last chapter – dismissed professional news organizations as too slow or limited in other ways, there was a sustained and strong reliance on what and how professional journalists reported. Sometimes news reports from professional organizations during developing events spurred volunteers to go to reddit in the first place, marking a moment in which peer aggregators should pay attention. A volunteer recounted the amount of news he had encountered in online news sites: “I think it was pretty big news at that time, and I was I think following the news online, when I saw this big news story that Libyan forces had captured him. I came to Reddit to probably post the story.” Here, the speed of reporting from professional journalists defined the breaking news moment, triggering the volunteer’s attention. Speed and volume of information around developing events that originated from online social networks was also expected. Large surges in information marked whether or not a story might be notable. Particular events drive attention to subreddits: in their information foraging activities, audiences of these events assume they can likely rely on participants in a particular subreddit community to at least mention – if not fully aggregate information about – a developing event. When we look at a particular subreddit, server log information pinpoints how strong some of 135 these information-seeking moments become. For instance, Figure 5 below shows spikes in pageviews and unique visitor counts in the /r/LosAngeles subreddit after a medium-sized earthquake occurred in the city in 2015. Figure 5. Pageviews and unique visitors per hour to the /r/LosAngeles subreddit following an earthquake in the local vicinity. While Twitter was by far the most cited social media platform for breaking news, some participants noted their experiences with other platforms and online communities. Occasionally, non-American platforms and forums became markers of a story possibly becoming big as activity increased from locals sharing information about the developing event. One interviewee, remembering the coverage of an airline crash, explained his participation in an online forum: I think I was browsing a local Taiwanese Reddit-like community. It's like an online community discussion board, and then I was in the aviation sector which I have an interest in, and then I think the news broke. It just happened when I was just browsing there. I thought this would be a good chance to get some karma, and I knew it was going to be big news. This local expertise allowed him to then get ahead of mainstream media to begin collecting information from local and international stories as the professional media caught up. However, these surges frequently produced complications. One especially critical side effect of information surges was noise. For people that want to follow a story – and especially 136 those who want to aggregate information about it – floods on social network sites were sometimes unhelpful. A former journalist explained that people go to reddit specifically to evade the noise produced by other online platforms: [Reddit has become a place that people go] because it's the easiest [site] to sort the wheat from the chaff in a lot of cases. If you've got one person updating the body of the text or a live thread or something like that, that's a lot easier to follow… Every time… I've done a search [on Twitter], and in the last 30 seconds, there were 1, 2, … 27 tweets in the last 30 seconds, right? And that's for a relatively small scale event that's only going to affect a certain type of person with that interest. And that's now [for this example] well an hour after that news was confirmed. And now you multiply that by a global scale event, trying to keep up with that sort of news takes work… using the search functions, you are going to have no luck. Another redditor explained that Twitter produces development-related information but also a lot of other non-news content, while reddit helps filter and summarize the important information about the crisis: On Twitter, it's so much [more] cluttered, it has so much spam, and it has people reacting to news, and it's like pray for this and pray for that. Those aspects don't contribute to the news for what people would want to see in it. So I find it interesting to just get the important aspect for what people want to see in the story and bring that in one place. I think Reddit is the perfect place for that. The Value of “Big” vs. “Small” Stories Frequently, big stories were also defined by feedback from the community. Feedback consists of a variety of mechanisms, from the amount of posts contributed in response to an event (akin to how professionals and participants on other social media platforms produce reactions to developing events) to the amount of reactions to contributions (like surges in viewers, upvotes, and comments). The more initial reactions that a post receives – as perceived by the wider reddit community – the more importance it is likely to have, reflecting offline, transnational concern and interest as well. For perceived big stories, especially those that gained widespread coverage in mainstream media, the number of responses eclipsed that of smaller stories. As one participant 137 explained, “When something big happens, it gains traction, and the number of posts goes up exponentially. Similarly, another moderator commented on the number of responses generated by larger events: Pretty much every major news event that becomes breaking news has the same phenomenon. Of course, the bigger it is, the more submissions we get… Of course, Paris was immense. Yesterday, there was the Turkey Russia plane shooting that brought 20 submissions with like 20 minutes. Pretty much every major news event gets something like that because every outlet reports it. Everyone sees it from a different outlet at different times, and they submit it right away without looking for duplicates or threads already on them. Information surges might manifest spatially in different ways on reddit – such as where people post contributions – depending on the type of event. For example, big stories might appear in distinct subreddits and not others. As one participant explained, a specific news subreddit dedicated to the Syrian Civil War was not the place to find stories and instead was reserved for the smaller, detailed stories that readers could ordinarily not find reported in mainstream media: Most people just want the big picture. Whereas the Syrian Civil War subreddit [was] just keeping incredibly focused on the little attacks, the little sieges, and just the very small stories. In fact, sometimes you won't even see [medium-sized stories]. In terms of upvotes, you actually had stories about individual fights going on on the ground and who was retreating up far and above [those medium stories]. The users of the subreddit, they can get the big picture somewhere else. Similarly, different subreddits will report on various types of news in different ways. One participant explained how only the biggest stories belonged in the “bigger” subreddits: I don't think [small stories] will ever get a lot of recognition [in big subreddits like /r/news], because I think a whole lot of news is actually posted that just never sees reactions. In that case, it's better for the major news stories to stay in the major subreddits. And if there are cases that interest you, in the case of a shooting, or in the case of like a plane disappearing, or whatever it may be, to get a subreddit for that. And just keep the small updates in there, so that they will stay visible. Because there are not a lot of posts in there that just don’t involve that thing. In /r/worldnews, there are filters for the refugee crisis, Syria, Iraq… They already have a system of like if you're not interested in like the Israeli-Palestine conflict, then you can just filter it out or just get that 138 information. In that way, they all have a function to narrow a few subreddits like that down to the stuff that interests you as a user. A former administrator similarly explained how different size subreddits attract different news, but as more communities emerge, the likelihood for certain topics to be discussed within them increases: I think as [reddit has] grown, and as those smaller and smaller [subreddits]… as there are more subreddits, and as more of them kind of have a critical mass –where there's going to be discussion about something big in the world on a subreddit – that is just increased. And I think that maybe there's a little more… there's more connections between the different discussions and the different communities. Also crucial to note is how moderators and especially administrators play important roles in how sizes of news stories are shaped within reddit’s ecosystem. For instance, in one case, admins stepped in to bring visibility to a big event, as the former admin recalled: [For Hurricane Sandy], we just thought, it’s something that is a big event for a lot of our audience, and a lot of people want to talk about it but didn't really have any central place to do that. Because that's just not the way the site's designed, for those communities. Elsewhere, you can sometimes see it really quickly but not within ours necessarily. So we just thought it made sense for us to step in and just sort of point people in the direction of this sort of room or place to talk about it. Further, expectations about big stories again produced conflicts, when the expectations of how reddit’s infrastructure works failed to be met. Recently, the biggest dispute has revolved around changes in the ranking algorithm. As one participant expressed: I don't know enough about it to have a strong understanding of what the problem is, but the stuff about how rapidly rising threads don't get on the front page anymore, that's another problem. It used to be that you could go to the front page and something that had happened in the last 15 minutes would be there, and you could see it, and you could follow it, whereas now, with France, I didn't see it on my front page all day. While I explore the ranking algorithm as a gatekeeping mechanism later in Chapter 7, here it helps highlight how the feedback from the technology – and not only the event itself – plays into people’s values around what constitutes important news within reddit’s ecosystem. Knowledge 139 of how reddit’s platform works (for instance, the dynamics of various ranking algorithms) becomes an important factor in understanding community norms on the site, as many participants drew from their past experience to inform their information aggregation practices. In the next section, I explore this experience in more depth. Both of these responses from professionals and wider online networks summed to produce the perceived size of a story for interview participants. So called “big” stories were notable for a number of reasons, and interview participants consistently expressed a difference in “big” events versus stories that were not as notable. The relevance of story or event size is important because 1) it motivated participants to want to contribute, but also 2) it defined platform-, community-, and network-wide expectations about what kind of news people could find and also depend on when using reddit (which then motivated future contributors with further expectations). On reddit, the largest expectation was that “big” stories deserved to be visible, which meant that they should and would appear on the front page of the site. One interviewee claimed, “If there's something really big that everyone can agree is big, then it's usually there.” Another stated, “I think almost all of my news comes from Reddit. Whenever something big or massive happens, it shifts to the front page pretty quickly.” Further, big stories were the events – given the thousands of news articles posted to reddit every day – that the crowd, the wider network of reddit users, surfaced (and it would almost always happen quickly). However, it depends again on the size of the event. As one contributor detailed, comparing platforms: Yeah, I definitely use the site for news. I found it a little bit uneven. I can count on it for really big events like the Paris attacks. I used a few news outlets [like] Google News… I feel a little bit scared by their algorithm. Are you really giving me the news or just what I 140 want to see? Then reddit is usually, actually is, my go to place for big news and then updates that are going on on the ground. “Bigger stories,” though, are seen as more valuable, so if something doesn’t exist yet, and the timing is right, posting is critical. However, this perception was at the expense of “slow” journalism, 67 or coverage of stories that last long periods. While larger events like the November 2015 Paris attacks were covered on reddit for many days, this manifestation may be due much more strongly to the sustained coverage by media organizations. Otherwise, specific stories might be relegated to one highly-upvoted post without future, related contributions getting a similar amount of voted support. It is important also to highlight that not all breaking news events end up getting reported on reddit with peer aggregation. Sometimes certain attributes of an event, or the flows of information around an event, impact what can and will be shared. When describing why coverage of one earthquake was more “memorable” than another, one participant claimed that, for one, you could follow it on TV for an entire day, whereas for another, it did not gain the same kind of media coverage: “I think that first one was just ... It was just a bigger quake, and I just remember the situation around it, sitting in the office, watching news on the TV the whole day, and updating the post as it went, whereas this one was more of an aftershock and there were quite a few aftershocks after that big quake, and this was just one of them.” Striving for “Facts” and Objective Information Participants identified another common trend in newsworthiness of information related to objective information. Usually, participants described this kind of information as the “facts” or the “truth” about a particular event. Objectivity has remained an important dimension of 67 http://niemanreports.org/articles/the-value-of-slow-journalism-in-the-age-of-instant-information/ 141 journalism for decades, and Schudson (2001) has described objective reporting as “the chief occupational value” of American journalism due to its usefulness in group solidarity and control and importantly as a factor in “public support and insulation from criticism” (165). Schudson recognizes that shifts in journalistic identity led to changes in the value of objectivity, such as the perceived need for “interpretive journalism” (164), though objectivity remains a dominant discourse in how to do newswork within journalistic circles. Participants generally lacked experience with journalistic norms, and they consistently described the existence of “facts” without referring to the processes of sourcing and verification (in other words, the processing of knowledge that leads us generally to consider some piece of information as a fact). However, perceived factual information remained a priority and value for what kind of information was seen as newsworthy and what would be included in participants’ aggregation. In one case, mrgandw explained that, when collaborating with two others on the MH370 airplane disappearance, there were many rumors circulating, and these values for reporting confirmed that information remained a primary goal: “Especially when nothing is known, like in MH370, you don't know what happens. There's lot of speculation… we made sure that there was no speculation or guesswork in the updates that we posted. We would only post confirmed facts so that we weren't misleading people or causing a stir when there shouldn't be.” Participants constructed the concept of factual information based on their own experiences with media and information they encountered online, from both mainstream media organizations and social media platforms. For example, when discussing his experiences providing information and data about earthquakes, theearthquakeguy specifically used mainstream media websites as a reference point. He described these sites as providing too much non-news content, presenting his own approach as a plain alternative: “I don't want to provide 142 news on a sensationalist sort of level, like on a news site. Just want to kind of go, here are the facts, here's what's likely to happen based on this experience or this past history, instead of some of these older, established sites like CNN and such.” He also explained how his role as a gatekeeper of information relied on his ability to filter the proper information out: “At the end of the day, you’re kind of the gateway that has to allow the right information through, the relevant information through, the true information through, and kind of get rid of all the rest of the crap and just take whatever comes with it.” Misinformation Interviewees also cited misinformation as a key issue when talking about providing factual information. Participants generally described a pattern of “getting it right” by providing truthful or factual information and trying to avoid misinformation. When Tony was aggregating information about a shooting in San Diego, he primarily relied on copying information over from a police scanner. He explained how he attempted to avoid affecting the story in his presentation: “I tried to use direct quotes wherever possible to avoid it coming down to a matter of my interpretation or not. That way it kind of keeps it fact based. It kind of takes me out of the equation, and that way people are basically reading what is actually being said.” Participants tended to describe the goal of providing factual information in relation to the widespread availability of misinformation. As I explained earlier, the Boston Marathon bombing incident helped set a community precedent to avoid as much as possible any uncertain or incorrect information. However, uncertainty frequently occurs during developing events, even for professional journalists, and contributors to peer information aggregation sometimes had to wager on including unconfirmed or uncertain information. 143 For instance, BlatantConservative aggregated information in response to many different events, and we discussed his use of multiple sources. He pointed to a particular perceived difference in professional sources’ approaches to information quality that impacted the way he thought about which sources to use: I try to give an idea of how reliable the source is instead of just not including something or including something, if that makes any sense. Like, if it's something from BBC, I basically treat it as facts because I've never been led astray by BBC. Like CNN and Fox and stuff will like a lot of the time get hyper and start reporting things as true when they're not confirmed yet. Stuff like that. Given the discourse around factuality, it was intriguing to see how comfortable many participants actually were with including uncertain information (and I explore the practices of editing uncertain information more in Chapter 5). Still, while participants were sometimes willing to include uncertain information, misinformation (when it could be detected) would never be considered newsworthy content to include in summaries or updates. In England, Spencer watched the information emerge after the November 2015 Paris attacks, and he recognized that very early on, there were a lot of rumors and unclear statements made, and his collaborators in a live thread had to deal with evaluating various bits of information as they came in: “Especially early on, it was a bit of a free throw, and you'd be moving things (not just if you've thought they might be inaccurate or unsubstantiated or not backed up by fact… filled with hyperbole or making the situation absolutely something which it wasn't).” Ultimately, they decided that posting everything was not the best approach, so as participants added things from various sources, if they seemed to be misinformation, they decided to simply remove them: “We would add things were added by other commentators, and we would remove some which we felt were not of a high standard.” 144 Bias Bias was also an important opposition to factual or truthful information. Earlier, I explained how some participants were demotivated by mainstream media reporting, like that from CNN or FOX, because of its perceived bias in shaping a poor news product for particular audiences. Some participants said that including objective information was necessary exactly because of its polarity with news produced by professional organizations who put spin or bias into their reporting. In France, LolNaie1 relied on a lot of mainstream (especially local) news organizations, but he noted that he positioned his aggregation work against the framing of mainstream news stories: “I just try to stick to the facts like no … I’m not trying to get ratings or anything. That’s because the media, the more mainstream media, they are trying to get ratings. That’s why you get so many inconsistencies because they’ll report anything they get their hands on.” When JP was recalling his experiences aggregating information after the Boston Marathon bombing, he explained how he didn’t want to put in any opinion of his own, unlike what some mainstream media organizations do when reporting: I know a lot of news sites tend to be biased one way or another. One thing I tried to do my hardest was just: here's the fact. Not what I think about it, not what other people think about it, not trying to spin it in one way… Like, “They were driving this kind of car.”: That's a fact, and you can't argue with it. I tried to keep that as much as I could as well… just because I don't like turning on the news and being like, “Obama said this and that means that he hates these people.” I'm like, “No, it doesn't. You're just spinning it.” I tried to keep that out as much as possible. Conclusion In this chapter, I demonstrated the various motivations for why people on reddit might decide to contribute to aggregating information during a breaking news event. In particular, I pointed out how motivations, experiences, and values might contribute to the perception of reddit as an alternative for participants who play both gated and gatekeeping roles. 145 When considering reddit for news, participants highlighted factors such as the range of aggregated sources, the speed of information circulation, and the connectivity of the user network as factors that made reddit stand out compared to other social media platforms or news organizations’ distribution. Participants may view reddit in these terms because of their common lack of professional journalism experience (even though prior major developments within the platform and social community have shaped people’s perceptions of how information should be collected and broadcast). Reddit users routinely expressed that reddit was a fair alternative to both mainstream media and other social media platforms because of its speed and foundation on crowd participation, though as I show in later chapters, this distinction may not necessarily play out strongly. Eventual contributors to breaking news appeared to be motivated because of their personal ability to contribute as well as the perception that audiences existed for their contributions, particularly within a networked community setting. These motivations hint at individuals’ determination to contribute to aggregation, whereas these motivations may not necessarily exist for traditional gatekeepers or gated, because of the particular nature of how aggregation begins and what role it plays in a community. Contributors’ seemed to be driven by a “peer production” mentality: like other peer production projects (e.g., Wikipedia), people feel like they have expertise, and they want to contribute to a larger public good. Motivations are particularly important as context for understanding the impact of network gatekeeping practices in an ecosystem like reddit. The motivations expressed by participants illustrate the assumptions that people have about who they do this volunteer work for and how they might feel when deciding to share certain information or being blocked from doing other activities. 146 The values of potential contributions present conflicting evidence that reddit truly exists as an alternative for gated participants. The perceived size of developing events appeared to draw from activity in mainstream media, though on occasion it occurred through word of mouth and other channels. Interestingly, the desire of participants to strive for the presentation of factual information puts aggregation in opposition to the experiences contributors had with other professional media reporting. However, as we will see in the next chapter, a heavy reliance on journalists’ work not only emerged from choosing certain information from professional news organizations but also vetting information from trustworthy sources, most of which seemed to be professional journalists or organizations. 147 Ch. 5: The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation This second analysis chapter seeks to answer the question, “What are the decisions and practices of peer information aggregation?” In the last chapter, I explored the contexts and opinions that drive contributors to aggregate information during developing events. This next chapter applies those motivations, experiences, and values to look at the specific practices of aggregation work. In this chapter, I begin to explore the finer dynamics of information production within reddit’s ecosystem to understand how aggregated information comes to be and what functional factors impact what kinds of aggregation can and cannot be done during high-tempo situations. The transition from motivation to participation involves a lot of decision making that melds the practices of peer production (contributing to a public good within the constraints of a system and community) with the processes of journalism (constructing a product for audiences through the discovery, evaluation, and confirmation of information). After participants have decided to contribute to an information aggregation task during a developing event, they build upon three stages of aggregation work, identified by Coddington (2015): “the construction of newsworthiness and news value… the process of evaluating and incorporating sources of evidence… and the process of verifying information and presenting it to an audience” (138). However, in developing events contexts, where immediacy and urgency factor strongly into the work of participants, contributors will go through an iterative cycle of all three of these stages, as new information appears from both social networks and media organizations, prompting them to re-evaluate and publicize new (and sometimes old) information. Aggregation further complicates the cycle, as participants must coordinate their own task between simultaneously evaluating information from multiple sources, receiving feedback from audiences, and watching for emergent developments. 148 Within the context of network gatekeeping, the second dimension of information production (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) again sits as an odd liminal state between peer information aggregation participants as playing the roles of both gated – since they take information provided by gatekeepers to share to other people – and gatekeepers – because they get to choose what information is shared and in what format, and they are responsible (to a certain extent) for its evaluation. By focusing on the decisions and choices that participants make when producing aggregated information, we can see how different this process of gatekeeping is from traditional reporting. As Coddington (2015) found in his work on journalists’ aggregation practices, peer information aggregation on reddit represents a type of “second order newswork” (C. W. Anderson, 2013a) using similar approaches as professional journalists but “operating at a remove from the objects on which it builds its news accounts” (155). Participants described their own and others’ aggregation as a type of “curated experience” of developing events. Sometimes participants described what they worked with as “news,” but many recognized it as a process of working with “information.” As former journalist naly_d told me, there is still a distinct separation between journalism and peer information aggregation: [What is going on on reddit is] information gathering. My thinking may be biased, but I don't think you can classify it as journalism unless someone is a trained journalist. Just like you could build a shed in your backyard but that doesn't make you a builder. Journalism is ... a specific amount of learning and understanding and training about the job and role and its impact and your responsibilities, whereas anyone can gather tweets as we've seen from Reddit. That's again, not to discourage anyone, but that's my opinion on what it would be. The structure of this chapter follows the information aggregation process: finding the appropriate space on reddit, searching for news-related information, evaluating sources, and verifying details. I aim to show how different affordances and limitations of information 149 production allow or restrict particular types of network gatekeeping. In this chapter, I primarily focus on information collection and sharing from an individual perspective; in Chapter 6, I go into the details of collaboration between multiple participants. Searching for Entry Points In Chapter 4, I explained that some participants see reddit as a primary source of news-related media and information. They might come to reddit in search of specific news coverage (after seeing alerts from mobile apps, television reports, or word-of-mouth), or they may be browsing reddit’s various communities and encounter news by chance. When aggregating information, contributors search for news about the event, but they also perform a second search behavior: finding the proper location in which to post the information they will aggregate. Sometimes information about the event – especially a link to one source – has already been posted, and it falls on the contributor to seek out this starting point. In other cases, there is no information within reddit’s various communities, and the contributor must make decisions about where and when to post new information. In general, there were three common tactics to finding the presence (or lack of) news within reddit’s system: going to the main subreddits for news, searching within specific subreddits that might have mentioned a news event, and finally looking through posts sorted by specific filtering algorithms to find emerging, new information. Main Subreddits for News Because reddit is split into many topical communities, information sharing around news becomes splintered. However, reddit’s “default” subreddits – which are chosen by the administrators and shown to all new users, as well as viewers without a user account – bring exponentially more readers to particular communities (in terms of millions compared to thousands). In the past seven 150 years, the default subreddit list has evolved, but /r/news (focused on American news) and /r/worldnews (focused on non-American news) have continually been the most-subscribed news- related subreddits since reddit’s launch. While many smaller event- or topic-based news subreddits exist, /r/news and /r/worldnews are upheld as the primary and sometimes only sources of news for some users. As an example, for teller8, an American student and three-year long participant on reddit, he doesn’t rely on any television, radio, or specific mainstream media news websites; reddit was his primary source of news. So he depended on these subreddits where news articles were aggregated from a variety of mainstream media websites: “I'll look at /r/news and /r/worldnews. But other than that, I don't use any other subreddit's for news.” Because /r/news and /r/worldnews attract many viewers, it also increases the likelihood of helpful contributions, with a trickle-down effect to other communities. With four years of experience on reddit under his belt, PabstyLoudmouth explained that the defaults tend to be the primary spaces of news, though occasionally bits and pieces will also pop up elsewhere. He said, “/r/worldnews was probably the most resourceful. That's the main one, and there's /r/news… even /r/videos had some decent stuff afterwards, trying to explain what had happened… and there's a new subreddit called /r/politicalvideos… that had some decent stuff afterwards.” In my participant observation work, I encountered a few instances of reactions to events in other subreddits, such as videos or pictures from developing events that emerged in /r/videos and /r/pics, respectively, because they could not be directly posted to the news subreddits, due to their rules on acceptable submissions. Similarly, people use geographically-specific subreddits for reporting on local crises and events (for instance, /r/boston was used for information aggregation as well as local aid coordination after the Boston Marathon bombings). When looking at the trace data created in reaction to the November 2015 Paris attacks, I also saw how 151 the responses carried out into other subreddit spaces after the obvious subreddits carried the initial conversations (Figure 6). Figure 6. Histograms of the number of posts and comments in reaction to the November 2015 Paris attacks over time, showing how the major news subreddits and local subreddits (/r/news, /r/france, /r/worldnews, /r/europe) were some of the first communities to report on the event, followed by a variety of others. Because of these main subreddits’ popularity, participants explained that they expected to find news – especially attention-driving news like information emerging from developing events – in these subreddits, especially at the top of the list: “You go to /r/worldnews, you click on the first page, and there it is.” Frequently, participants claimed they encountered a developing news 152 story in a top post or comment in their ranked reddit feed. Expecting a story to appear at the top of a given subreddit also related to the relative size of the response to the event. As explained in the last chapter, bigger stories were guaranteed to rise to the top due to a distributed amount of interest (resulting in it being highly upvoted). Spencer told me, for instance, that when he browses reddit, he expects the things he sees covered in other sources on the top of reddit: “It's actually really hard to miss the stories that I will be going there for. Say, like, [the] Russian bomber yesterday. Guaranteed to be at the top of /r/worldnews one, /r/Europe it was on, it even made to /r/UnitedKingdom… I've found over the years it tends to select itself, or it will already be at the top.” Another interviewee confirmed this expectation: “Most likely if something big is happening, it's probably on the front page when you log in.” Filtering Algorithms for News Sometimes, though, developing stories do not make it all the way to the top of the subreddit ranking. In these cases, participants continue to search with other features of reddit’s platform. Occasionally, alternate forms of searching include explorations of secondary filtering algorithms, like the “new” or “rising” ranking queues. These ranking algorithms allow newly-posted content to become more visible within the overall subreddit ranking results, where posts that were recently contributed or that were voted on in quick succession rise to the top. Using these algorithms brings focus to emerging information that might not be immediately shared within reddit’s ecosystem. Spencer explained that moderators, who pay attention to all aspects of a subreddit, can see how quickly people respond to any event when they are looking through the various ranking channels: “I moderate the Europe subreddit, and I tend to spend more time looking at the new or rising posts in there. If 153 it is a developing story. If something has just emerged, then I'll instinctively look for new and rising because I will be waiting to see the comments as they drip in as whatever events unfold.” People also possess expectations around the use of these algorithms. If news has not appeared at the top of a popular subreddit, users anticipate that they will find something about the event in the rising or new queues. Not finding any information results in confusion. When Anthony had first learned about the Boston Marathon crisis, he was confused to not find anything about the event on reddit in the places he looked: “Since it wasn't in /r/news, and it wasn't in rising or anything like that, and I couldn't find anything reddit thread about it, it surprised me.” Occasionally, a participant mentioned exploring results filtered by algorithms in more depth. For example, kash_if, who moderated the /r/India subreddit, told me that a member of a particular community needs to learn how the larger group of voters reacts to particular types of events. Sometimes, to find relevant news that other people did not find relevant, it was necessary to take into account voting behaviors and use different filtering algorithms to surface overlooked content: I first check the hot pages, like the front page of the subreddit, and then I go to the new section. If I have a lot of time, I actually check the controversial section also. For example, /r/India is politically very divided. It's a very polarized subreddit, and there's a lot of vote brigading which happens. To kind of see some of the news items which get downvoted (just because people don't agree with it), you need to go to the controversial section. Topical Subreddits for News Finally, participants also sometimes mentioned that they would look for information from specific smaller news subreddits in their feeds or even click into the subreddits’ pages to look for particular information. Local subreddits in particular were highlighted as important spots to look for news, because they could surface location-relevant information. One participant explained 154 how when he travels, he’ll take a look first at the local subreddit when a nearby event occurs, to see if he can find anybody talking about it: I really like the local subreddits, so I usually check those out if I'm traveling somewhere… If there's something particular in the news that's going on, I might check out a subreddit that's related to that. … If there's something going on in the news, I'll usually try to go to either a local subreddit… so that I can see what people there are saying about it. In other cases, if the event relates to a particular topic, he immediately checks out the various subreddits to look for that news, in case he can contribute: “Or if something happened involving… if there was a plane crash, a small plane crash, I'll see… one of the pilots flying subreddits. So, either local, either the local perspective, or the subject matter, expertise perspective.” Encountering Multiple Posts After users settle on a set of spaces to search for news on reddit, they encounter news in some form (including possibly its absence). Participants encountered two conflicts during such searches: either 1) a post did not exist, and they had to provide a new contribution, or 2) more frequently, they had to choose between multiple emerging posts after an event began. In cases where a post did not exist, participants used various techniques described above to make sure that nothing had been submitted in various subreddits before deciding to contribute. However, when faced with multiple posts on the same subject, the decision-making process around where to post or to which to append new content became critical to the work they ultimately did. When other posts about a news event had already been created, participants were motivated to contribute – as we saw in Chapter 4 – because they wanted to increase the quality, add information, or append corrections. During a developing event, however, many posts can be simultaneously submitted, even to the same subreddit (see Figure 7 below). Interviewees 155 explained that the potential traction of a post generally determined how they chose which to contribute to. Figure 7. The “new” queue of /r/news shortly after the first announcements of the late 2015 Paris attacks. Paris- related contributions are highlighted in yellow. Established visibility – e.g., by already being strongly upvoted and ranked – also determined which posts contributors saw in the first place. When peva3 began his aggregation of information about a local shooting, he saw a post 68 and commented 69 on it a little over 32 minutes later. Out of the various posts he could have commented on, he explained that he went with the one with the most traction, saying, “I think [I chose this particular post to contribute to] because… it was 68 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1mhxhk/active_shooter_sought_at_washington_dc_navy_yard/ 69 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1mhxhk/active_shooter_sought_at_washington_dc_navy_yard/cc9ef0p 156 the largest and the one on the front page. … Probably the first one that had the highest amount of votes, that was probably the reason.” He then alluded to the difficulty of having to search through so many posts to begin with, so one with more initial upvotes might be the preferred one: “There's always a ton of threads, and for me, it has been before really difficult for me to go through them and figure out which one has the best people posting on it and all that kind of stuff.” Multiple postings can lead to complications, however, because when threads are competing for attention, it can lead to similar amounts of contributions across both spaces. As theearthquakeguy explained: You get a lot of that, simply because… when people go into the “new” [queue] to see which one people are actually talking on, and no one will have talked too much at that point, they'll start contributing on both. And then people will go, “Oh, there's eight comments here, and there's nine comments here,” and they'll pick one or the other. At that point, you kind of have two main threads emerge. Another interviewee who was local to Boston and had contributed information after the Boston Marathon bombing explained that, for him, it was difficult to choose, because there wasn’t a clear-cut reason to choose one single post over another: “There are a bunch of different news posts that were posted, and then I tried to look through comments on those posts, because when I first started out there wasn't one post that was the only one that was there… there were a ton of different ones.” He explained that, early on after an event, none of them in particular have more votes than others, and many people contribute to each, so the final decision could be arbitrary: “They were all being uploaded at the same time, so they all appear at the top. People comment on different ones because they don't know which one they should comment on.” One of the most confusing situations that I experienced when conducting participant observation during the November 2015 Paris attack aggregation was when three live threads 157 were almost-simultaneously created and posted to three different subreddits. In the past, during other events, I had encountered an individual or a group of people focusing on one, but in the fast pace at which users were posting information to reddit in this case, many people were sharing links to all three different subreddits. (I discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 7 along with how moderators and administrators coordinated to choose one thread to promote to the entire site.) In addition to multiple posts being created, they might be created in different subreddits, meaning that distinct audiences would read and contribute to each of them. Subreddit-level considerations also factored into which posts participants chose to follow or contribute to. In discussing his contributions around the MH370 airplane crash, mrgandw told me how he needed to choose between a few posts: “The actual news story itself: there was a link on /r/news and one on /r/worldnews.” He perceived that one subreddit might get more traffic than another, though. At the time, /r/worldnews was not yet a default subreddit, and therefore it was less popular and had a smaller automatic audience than /r/news. He simply said, “I saw the one on /r/news first, so that's just kind of the one I went into. Just go with the flow of traffic, I guess.” In general, some participants have described multiple posts emerging during a breaking event as noisy and unhelpful, but some participants have noted that many people want to contribute these submissions for personal benefit. In his seven years on reddit, JP had a lot of experience with various breaking news situations, whether crises or events like popular movie trailer releases. He highlighted how whenever a new event occurs, people want to be the first one to add a link, resulting in many duplicates (like those in Figure 7): Now with newer threads, some people will start it up, but then you have everybody who's just like, "I want to be a part of this. I want to post stuff." … When the World of Warcraft trailer went up, for example, if you went to /r/movies or the WoW subreddit or any of those stuff, and you clicked on "new," every single post was somebody posting the link to 158 this trailer because everybody wanted to be the first to do it. That happens on a small scale with something just like a trailer for some game or Star Wars or whatever. When something as big as Boston or Paris or whatever happens, you're going to just see even more people try to do the same thing, where they're just trying to get information out there as fast as possible. Moderators in particular noticed trends around multiple simultaneous submissions. When the November 2015 Paris attacks occurred, HJonGoldrake was a moderator from Italy in the /r/Europe subreddit. In his experience as a moderator and participant on reddit for four years, he walked me through how these duplicates appear one after the other, because so many news organizations report on it, distributing the coverage across multiple websites, and allowing multiple users to submit distinct links to each subreddit: Pretty much every major news event that becomes breaking news has the same phenomenon. Of course, the bigger it is, the more submissions we get… of course, Paris was immense. Yesterday, there was the Turkey Russia plane shooting that brought 20 submissions within like 20 minutes. Pretty much every major news event gets something like that because every outlet reports it. Everyone sees it from a different outlet at different times, and they submit it right away without looking for duplicates or threads already on them. The difficulty with multiplicative coverage of a single event manifests when many more people are concerned about submitting new emerging information than helping evaluate and filter it. In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, Anthony said that there did not seem to be enough people contributing to voting on every new submission, meaning that it was extremely difficult for some new pieces of information to be filtered to the top. He explained: The one thing that it doesn't work for very well is whenever there's a lot of information coming in really quickly. If there's 50 to 100 posts within the span of 20 seconds, it's really hard for people to properly go through and upvote or downvote everything, especially if too many people are spending too much time commenting rather than reading. I think that we had a good mix of that whenever we had a large number of people. I think that's where the upvote/downvote mechanic fails is whenever the number of people participating and reading shrinks compared to the number of people reporting. One of the problems that ended up happening with the /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit… was that everybody was reporting and very few people were actually reading 159 and verifying. There was no verification process going on at all. They were going over the same old information. Overall, in finding the right place to contribute on reddit, the emergent complications of people’s responses to developing events on reddit shapes how information production begins. Because potential participants rely on the contributions of others to situate their own work, it opens up the possibility for greater participation in aggregation practices, but it also limits these possibilities in the sense that a great amount of randomness affects the introductory process, resulting in improvised decisions on the part of the contributor (an issue I explore further in other parts of this chapter). These decisions then have continued effects on how gatekeeping plays out once people begin to aggregate information and audiences interact with these products. Contributing Aggregated Information Aggregating information is a specific type of information task, different from both journalistic news story creation as well as basic duplication of information. The process combines many steps of finding information, judging the sources, evaluating the information, and broadcasting the compilation. Though some people might consider aggregation as merely replicating the information from one place to another, de-facto-idiot described it as a process of bringing together multiple perspectives and providing a neat synopsis for people: Some will say it's just a pure copy and paste job. … [F]or me, it's more like you are sifting through a lot of information [and] you try to combine them into a more readable way. … [E]very major news [source], they provide… different perspectives… I was just trying to sift through and see where are the problems with this that [each] news source provides. … More like news filtering and just combining [it]… Make it [into] a nice summary for people… Of course, because peer information aggregation is an emergent and constantly evolving practice, different participants will conduct themselves in varying ways. This chapter therefore 160 explores the variations between contributions and the decisions that make up the “information production” of network gatekeeping (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008). Participation in online platforms revolves around a mix of contributory behaviors (posting, commenting, etc.) and viewing behaviors (such as lurking; Nonnecke, Andrews, & Preece, 2006). While readers play an important role in the news as it circulates on reddit, contributing actions form the foundation of aggregation in practice. The amount and types of contributions vary in any peer production system. Generally, scholars point to the inequality of contributions, either the skewed, “long tail” number of users or users’ contributions (Newman, 2005). For instance, on Wikipedia, “stable patterns of inequality” persist (Ortega, Gonzalez-Barahona, & Robles, 2008). On Twitter, “roughly 50% of URLs consumed are generated by just 20k elite users” (Wu, Hofman, Mason, & Watts, 2011). In the case of specific tasks, types of participation and participants vary. Contributors that participate early on Wikipedia during breaking news events, for instance, are crucial to supporting long- term collaborations within articles (Keegan et al., 2013). The quantity of contributions does not necessarily correlate with the quality of contributions, particularly when small contributions (like edits) may help to augment the future contributions of others (Adler, de Alfaro, Pye, & Raman, 2008). In developing situations, contributions vary across all social media sites, and research shows that news events especially impact information broadcasting and circulation (Acar & Muraki, 2011; L. Palen et al., 2009). In crisis situations and highly-attended events, information broadcasting as well as brokerage were key to the dynamics of content sharing (Hughes & Palen, 2009). The types of contributions can vary over time: for example, on Twitter in reaction to the spread of the H1N1 virus, people most often shared professional news sources and information 161 related to resources, though eventually these types were eclipsed by personal experiences (Chew & Eysenbach, 2010). Similarly, coverage on Twitter of the 2011 Queensland floods in Australia resulted in a lot of information and media contributions, with a lesser amount of personal experiences, reactions, and support. The level of experience of the contributor may also affect the kinds of information and sources they choose to share. The account ages of Twitter participants are positively associated with the number of times that other users recirculate their respective tweets (Suh, Hong, Pirolli, & Chi, 2010). In many platforms – from social networks to social news sites – newer members participate less, and they are inspired to participate more when they become accustomed to the platform and community norms (Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2009; Lampe & Johnston, 2005). In situations like crises, new participants are likely to make contributions when they have little experience (Shklovski, Palen, & Sutton, 2008), and in these situations newer members appear to share different kinds of content than more experienced members (Leavitt & Clark, 2014). Information Contributions Peer information aggregation generally fell into two categories: updates provided through posts and comments, and updates provided – after the new feature was designed and released – in live threads. Even after the live thread feature was developed, though, people continued to use post and comment updates (usually switching to a live thread once it was clear that one was necessary, judged by the amount of information coming through other channels). Below, I first explore the production of comment and post updates. Unlike journalists, who tend to follow standardized ways of reporting, the decisions for information reporting in peer information aggregation were not systematic. For this analysis, I summarized data from 150 sampled comment or post updates (the large majority of which were posted to /r/news or 162 /r/worldnews), spanning from November 22, 2010 to April 14, 2016. This sample is not meant to be representative nor used for statistical comparisons; instead, I use these instances of peer information aggregation as references and illustrations for understanding the practices of this form of aggregation. Length The length of comment and post update threads varied. In a little less than half of the cases, the contributions were lengthy and verbose (taking up more than two browser window lengths of formatted text; see Figure 8). However, it would mischaracterize the ways in which people aggregated information to only describe these practices in examples like the responses to the Aurora, Colorado shootings, the Boston Marathon bombings, or the MH370 disappearance, which were compiled by larger groups of people over dozens of pages and over the course of days or even weeks. 163 Figure 8. The number of posts based on length of the total updates, ranging from short length (one to two paragraphs) to long (reaching the maximum number of characters). 70 Formats: Bullet Points, Summaries, and More Generally, it seemed that people who contributed to peer information aggregation posted in an arbitrary manner. Certainly, there was no official or standardized format. However, some formal techniques became more prevalent than others, and two general trends emerged from these contributions: 1) including information and links in a sequential, bullet point format, with short items listed one after the other usually in chronological order (Figure 9), and 2) providing information via a summarized format, with longer, narrative-style explanations of information (Figure 10). 70 Sometimes aggregation submissions merely included a few updates with information that the contributor felt was important and wanted to share with the larger reddit community. Although not an analysis pursued for the purpose of this dissertation, in many instances, dozens of people would post comments in response to a news article with only one update or one link to a news or information source covering the developing event. Sometimes the contributor updating a larger thread would incorporate these comments, but inclusion depended on if the contributor were monitoring the rest of the thread or receiving messages from other users. 164 Figure 9. A short comment thread aggregating information in “bullet point” style about the MH370 plane disappearance. 71 The author lists links and information in short lines with “edits” in chronological order. Figure 10. A medium comment thread aggregating information in “summary” style about a bus explosion in Russia. The author includes links, but generally the information is presented in a summarized, narrative style. 71 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1zur6k/malaysia_airlines_plane_loses_contact_malaysia/cfx6hx0 165 Not everyone followed a set standard, resulting in a varied sense of quality, particularly in earlier years. For example, one contributor who had not previously participated in any kind of information aggregation explained how her audience pointed her toward a proper method of formatting: “[S]omeone was just like, ‘You should just keep it under the same thread,’ I think, because I had [commented] twice on the main thread [in different comments]. Then I was like, ‘Oh, I should probably just do “edit.” I just started doing that… I would find the one [update] and then… add edits as I found stuff.’” Another participant described how updating in a sequential format became too cumbersome, so he ended up only creating summaries of the information: “I know a lot of people tend to use ‘Edit 1’ or ‘Edit 2’ every time they edit; they want to make sure what's being edited [is clear]. I tried doing that initially, but it just took too much time. So I decided that a summary… was easier to use and was more natural to use.” A third participant explained his similar penchant for summaries, because they helped him take a step back to understand the full extent of what he was doing and what was going on around him: [An overview] is also more practical for me, because I get news one thing at a time, [so] it helps to write this overview of what's going on. It helps me get a grip on what's actually going on, because with all these tiny [bits of] news coming in from left and right, it's hard to get a better appreciation of what's really happening. You tend to forget, like, “Oh yeah that's right, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened and then…” … Because you get so many news [updates], you can forget what has happened before. Submissions with summaries included at least one block of text summarizing many pieces of information related to the event, rather than providing a quote, link, or other basic piece of information. A little more than half of the contributions I collected contained a summary of information (Figure 11). 166 Figure 11. The number of contributions that contain a summary format for included information. For submissions that contained “bullet point” styled information, these updates were usually formatted in a sequential update arrangement, sometimes making note of when and from whom new information was added (i.e., the frequent uses of “EDIT 1,” “EDIT 2,” etc.). In cases where bullets occurred, they tended to continue on for long periods of time, including many updates (Figure 12). Figure 12. The number of contributions that contain bullet point formats (including “edits”). Few equates to less than one-third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. 167 The bullet-point style was more common across these posts, reflective of how they acted as information hubs that the contributors continuously updated. Participants have to be able to communicate the information they’ve gathered as concisely and easily as possible, so the concept of readability repeatedly appeared in conversations with contributors. De-facto-idiot had helped to create many summaries of information after the MH370 airplane crisis, 72 and he told me that his approach to information inclusion and formatting was simple: “Honestly, there were only two concerns. It was accessibility – I want it in a readable fashion – and then I wanted it to be transparent, so that you could see everything as it was going on, including edits.” He went on to argue that these two facets of his work were an “obligation” of regular journalism, so he should strive to do it in a similar manner, because there were at least some people relying on his updates to get information. Interestingly, a large number of comment and post update threads contained no timestamps (Figure 13). While it might seem that it would be easy for readers to understand when information appeared in the moment, occasionally contributors realized that timestamps were particularly helpful for certain situations, especially ones that were prolonged over the course of many hours or days. In the middle of compiling information after the Boston Marathon bombings, Anthony recalled that he had realized he needed to include timestamps. “One of the things that I realized, and this was something I always remember whenever I look at the thread is that if you go back to the thread, you'll notice that the first 29 updates don't have time stamps. I didn't realize that that was going to be a problem.” He explained to me that he eventually decided to include them because, after so much time updating, it would help people to reference the 72 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1zviu0/comprehensive_timeline_malaysia_airlines_flight/cg26zkq 168 information, as well as provide more context to any reader looking back at the thread in the future: This was the first one I had ever done. I didn't realize how big the thread was going to get. I would just update, “Here's a live feed of the finish line. Here's some pictures. The bomb squad is in route to Massachusetts Avenue and Newberry, etc.” Then, I realized that people would actually want to look back on some of this stuff and figure out what the timeline was actually like. On the 30th update I did, I started posting timestamps, and it helped me keep track of when I heard something, when something was posted, when something was reported. Figure 13. The number of contributions that include timestamps. Few equates to less than one-third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. In addition to informational updates, many participants also expressed the obligation to address specific information needs of particular audiences. Some of these needs focused on particular factual details of the event’s ongoing developments. For instance, one participant explained that he bolded particular updates because “I think in that thread there were some people in there who actually needed information. It seemed like they were there to ask, ‘Okay, what's going on? I'm across the street,’ or, ‘I’m at the airport,’ or, ‘I'm close to this. Does anyone know what's going on?’” 169 These additional decisions frequently come down to personal perception and awareness of potential audiences: “I think basically the same things that I would want to see on reading a post. More than a fire somewhere. What happened? How many people were involved, what's being done to fix it and is there an investigation going on?” One of those moments of audience awareness came during natural disasters and emergency situations. When I asked about what kind of relevant information alphaque posted in response to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, he recalled: Stuff like emergency numbers, radio frequencies or the one that got a lot of attention was if you know someone in Christchurch, how do you contact them. Even just little things like if you are in Christchurch ... I think Google at the time had a registry of people that could put themselves up to be searched and information, I don't know. Free cell phone calls or some mobile networks were down, land lines were down, just things like that that were useful to anyone looking for information. I guess it was more for people overseas looking for anyone in New Zealand. Not only was the event worthy of providing continual updates for, but the volunteers decided it was important to include other relevant emergency information. (To note, the practice of including emergency information was uncommon and seemed only to occur in response to ongoing events particularly inflected with urgency and crisis; Figure 14). Figure 14. The number of contributions that include emergency information. 170 The news values around what should and should not be included in particular situations could be highlighted even in multi-contributor collaborations. The need to include corrections to ongoing updates became a point of newsworthiness to one group of interview participants. One contributor explained simply, “If I see somebody posting something that's dead wrong or slanderous or just dumb, then that probably motivates me to post more.” Sometimes the entry point for a volunteer to contribute to a lengthy story initiated in response to a piece of misinformation. However, while we saw earlier that misinformation was an opposition to newsworthy information (i.e., what to include in updates to a breaking news event), during an instance of correcting information, misinformation became relevant to include (to provide context for the new correction). Explaining the decision to include information with a strike- through text formatting, one interviewee said, “I can tell you that if someone has posted something and it hasn't been confirmed, and then it's confirmed to be false, I'll usually go back and cross it out if it turned out to be false. I think it's better than deleting it, because people can't see that it's false if it's deleted. It gives people a chance to see that it was actually.” All in all, these practices demonstrate that – because no standardization exists across reddit’s community members’ responses to breaking news – participants generally improvised their aggregation work, finding ways that fulfill certain personal goals (e.g., making it easy to read) while going from a gut feeling of what they thought should be done (I. Schultz, 2007). As another participant from Boston who helped during the Boston Marathon aggregation explained, “I kind of just wung it, I guess. I guess I've been on reddit for a long time, and that's just the way that a lot of people write posts, is that they just have a bunch of edits where they list them a lot of the time. For events like this, they include time tamps, sometimes they put it where the newest information is at the top, I don't know.” 171 Live Threads as Design Intervention After the widespread acknowledgement of the post and comment update threads from the Aurora, Colorado shootings and the Boston Marathon bombing, reddit administrators decided to create a new feature for the platform, the “live thread” format. This feature, separate from the ordinary URL or text submissions, allows a group of contributors to add short snippets of information to a collaborative page that presents the information in reverse chronological order. The shift to using live threads was slow, but in some situations – particularly during larger events and crises – a user will create one and begin to collect information with a few other participants. The live thread’s draw resides in its simplicity and affordances for collaboration. BlatantConservative had participated in many different live threads in the past few years, and he explained its ease and convenience of use compared to the former comment and post updates, saying, “[I]f you can make a live comment, you can make a live thread, and the live thread is a lot easier to share around and follow. The format makes a lot more sense. People find it easier to understand.” A major benefit of the live thread is that it standardizes formatting for all participants. Above, I explained that with updated comments and posts participants will make personal decisions about how to include certain formatting information like timestamps. The live thread automatically includes contextual information, like the username for each participant and the time an update was posted, and it keeps everything in order so a reader can understand the temporal relationship of information. Also, the feature will automatically format non-textual metadata like tweets, images, and videos, so that it is easy to browse media content right in the feed without having to click through to other websites. Spencer, one of the moderators of /r/Europe, told me that these features make the live thread particularly attractive for updating on 172 events, so his team of moderators can focus on simply removing duplicated updates instead of monitoring the format as well: “[I]f you will simply copy paste a Twitter link, the Reddit function will automatically grab the Twitter format I suppose. It requires very little or requires very intellectual formatting from us other than to delete the clutter.” It seemed like in most cases, the types of information posted were not particularly different than regularly updated textual posts and comments, but the ease of including more people and automatic formatting meant that more information from various sources could be added in a faster manner. Reflecting on his participation in the Boston Marathon bombings aggregation, Anthony detailed to me how the live threads provide a smoother experience for contributors and readers: “[I]t's got a lot of benefit… like benefits to make it look good and benefits to make it run smoothly. It runs much smoother than having to go and edit a thread constantly. It timestamps automatically. It's got a lot of benefits like that.” However, he did also note that the live thread’s clean style of presentation might make it seem more credible and professional, complicating the situation if any misinformation were to be posted by a bad contributor: At its core, if false information is being put forth through that medium, that might actually be a bigger detriment because it gives more mental credibility because you're seeing everything work so smoothly and you're seeing everything look so smoothly and everything's so seamless. It seems to give it more credibility, when in actuality it's less vetted. There's less community moderation. There's less community participation. Another important problem with the live thread was its visibility: commenting on a rising post is a suitable way to gain attention in a fast manner. Live threads, though, take some time to grow, and they must be reshared to a subreddit as a URL or included as a link in a comment (see Figure 15 as an example). More commonly, participants will begin to update in comments and then transition over to a live thread eventually, when there is a critical mass of participants available. I explore the issue of visibility more in Chapter 7. 173 Figure 15. Users trying to coordinate the creation of a live thread and then linking to it in a comment. Relevance Across all cases, one of the most important factors in choosing a piece of information or continual updates from a specific source was whether or not the source provided important, relevant, and/or reputable information. Occasionally, though, the reason was arbitrary. When teller8 was helping other users aggregate information about the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, he explained how most information posted related only to individual judgment, saying, “It was pretty much a free for all. If we saw something first that we thought was important and verifiable, we would go ahead and post it.” This element of “importance” or “relevance” was dominant in recollections of what kind of information people contributed. These factors seemed to be largely subjective, though participants pointed out some markers that indicated reliability. Another contributor pointed out this facet of personal judgment when discussing his compilation of information related to political statements made by North Korea: “What I chose to include was things that I thought were important and relevant, and because that is the opinion of one person that of course can be subject to certain underlying biases that I'm not aware of, despite the fact that I may try and downplay or push those away as much as possible.” 174 Crucial to what information they ultimately decided to post, participants tended to feel that anything that might be relevant was worthy of including in their updates. Sometimes participants would discover a source they found reliable and merely replicate the same information so that people could browse through it more easily. For instance, stillcole listened to a police scanner and typed up much of what was sent through the audio, but he still reproduced the important highlights in his update thread: I was hardly even thinking about what the police scanner was even saying. I was just kind of typing in what was being said. Obviously some of these things are more important than others… but when they said stuff like, “Oh, the suspect appears to be firing shots from the bedroom window.” That's something that, in my interpretation, seems to be something important and something worth highlighting. In other cases, contributors described momentary changes in the event that prompted particular information to be shared. During the hunt for the escaped suspects after the Boston Marathon bombing, JP – who had been following and helping with updates – remembered when the police initially found one of the Tsarnaev brothers during his escape; JP said that he volunteered to provide live information in the moment. To him, the judgment of relevant information that he posted changed depending on how long after a new development emerged: [Relevant means if the information] was about the situation at hand. At first it was just this MIT officer was shot, so any links that started off at the beginning were information about that officer and what went down. I know after a while there was a donation fund set up for the officer and his family, so links like that. … It's putting out what I thought was relevant information and then affixing anything that ended up not being relevant. The apparent arbitrariness of what information to include and how to include it may have been partly a result of information aggregation as an emergent practice in the community. News values around what kind of and which specific information to include (or not) seem to have evolved over time, as people experience others’ contributions during older developing events and then reference them for their own. Still, some randomness appeared to play into contributors’ 175 decisions, depending on what they thought was relevant in the moment, based on the particular sources they had access to and what kind of information those sources were sharing. However, ideals around evaluation and verification seemed somewhat less arbitrary, and I explore these decisions in the next sections below. Sourcing and Verifying Information After searching for news within reddit, participants then need to find sources of information to include in their contributions. In Chapter 4, I explained the kind of sources that participants discussed outside reddit (such as what they are used to on a daily basis, as well as local media that they might trust more), in addition to the different types of news that they look to and rely on during breaking news situations (such as mainstream media, various social media platforms – especially Twitter – and expert sources like police scanners or press conferences). Below, I explain how participants evaluated sources, ultimately relying strongly on mainstream media organizations because they were easy to trust and provided a traditional sense of reliability. Evaluating and verifying information represents perhaps one of the most critical points of difference between professional journalists and volunteer aggregators. Journalists based in media organizations possess resources, skills, and professional ideals that structure the ways in which they evaluate and verify new information. The hierarchy of sources actually appear to be replicated in alternative journalistic media (Atton & Wickenden, 2005). Journalists do struggle to find proper sources from social media platforms, due to the huge amount of information produced in reaction to events (Diakopoulos, De Choudhury, & Naaman, 2012). So-called citizen journalists, on the other hand, struggle to do similar work. While it is possible that many volunteers can help to verify information, it is not an easy task and requires participants who are skillful at evaluating information. But participants who participate in peer-to-peer information 176 sharing in these situations do struggle with it, and “their orientation toward information credibility also diverges from traditional journalism, relying on interpersonal trust and the availability of visual evidence” (Veenstra, Iyer, Park, & Alajmi, 2014). Journalists are beginning to experiment with and improve these processes. One journalist I spoke to, Andy Carvin, has ample experience with conducting networked, crowdsourced reporting (Hermida et al., 2014). At his news start-up, Reportedly, he commands a team of a dozen reporters all over the world who rely on the volunteer contributions of participants on Twitter and other social media platforms to collect, verify, and share data related to selected stories. He described the process of what his team does as covering events “differently than a lot of other news organizations, because we openly admit when we’re not sure if something is true.” He explained to me how he enlists a large network of international, online participants to vet information as it comes through their pipeline, a process that he referred to as “social news gathering”: We'll receive a video from somewhere: while we may be looking at it forensically from one angle or another, people will often volunteer to help translate it or look at the metadata associated with it or do other things to help us piece together what's going on… The teams pretty talented at using a whole range of forensic tools to analyze information as it's coming in to see if it's potentially legit or not. There are times where something will be happening in a part of the world where we know very little about and ultimately it does take a bit of teamwork with people on the ground there to help us sort out things. While Carvin and his team were trained journalists, volunteers that appear on reddit are usually not (as I explained in Chapter 4). The skillset that participants on social media platforms bring to information circulation and aggregation therefore significantly shape how information is chosen, vetted, shared, and then ultimately received by audiences. Still, participants usually attempt to be journalistic in their information processing behaviors. For instance, contributors deemed newspaper reports as more reputable than online 177 media like blogs when they were involved in crisis communication (F. Schultz et al., 2011). Research has found that people producing content around news events adapt toward the styles and systems of professional journalists (Hänska-Ahy & Shapour, 2013). Bloggers who perceive their work as closer to journalism are more likely to follow journalistic ideals, such as conducting proper sourcing and verification (Gil de Zuniga et al., 2011). However, there are participants that do not follow this trend. Research has shown that some bloggers, for instance, tend to shift from exact journalistic practices (like verification) and instead guide their work by interpretation (Tremayne, 2007). Some scholars have argued that journalism already exists as a form of “collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked” (Hermida, 2012) much like what occurs as ordinary people report on developing events. But because traditional journalists maintain an aura of professionalism, audiences tend to perceive them as having more media credibility than citizen journalists (even though trust between news workers and readers plays just as large a role for both journalists and citizen reporters; Nah & Chung, 2012). Further, those who do citizen journalism work may “care less about their role in the process” where they don’t view their “guiding principles as being related to traditional journalism” (Holton et al., 2013). In the context of network gatekeeping, the question becomes whether or not contributors to peer information aggregation produce sources and verify information in similar ways to journalists or if they form their own approaches to these practices. Stepping on from what participants looked for and how they wanted to contribute information, I now look at how those information aggregation contributors do the work of choosing sources and collecting information. First, I examine the environment and processes that participants navigated when collecting information from various places and specifically examine 178 the kinds of information shared from particular sources. I then explore – relating back to the news values of the previous chapter – how participants described what made a particular source good, reliable, or relevant. Sourcing Depending on the event and the person updating information, the sources that participants integrated into their updates varied significantly. In some cases, a contributor might only rely on one source, providing updates directly from a police scanner. In other cases, a contributor would decide to draw from as many sources as was possible, given the constraints of their time and attention. In the Boston Marathon bombing aggregation, Anthony told me that the ultimate goal was to create a “comprehensive” location for multiple sources, regardless of what sources people ultimately included. He said: I think people wanted a central repository for all this online information that you couldn't get from traditional sites. There was no place you could actually go, besides our thread, to find a comprehensive system of links that included reporters, official news sources, everything from Dead Spin to a fire department scanner to Twitter to YouTube [feeds] of at least 8 different reporters and people that were there. It was just comprehensive… In cases where the contributor searched through many different sources, the task became much more difficult. Many contributors detailed the intensity of the situation, emotional on the one hand and practically difficult on the other. It was not unusual for a volunteer to explain how they looked through dozens of websites, trying to keep track of information coming out from Twitter searches, news organization live video feeds, a variety of mainstream news websites, and various other sources (not to mention word of mouth from family and friends). While participants generally aimed to provide as many sources as possible – especially during more- urgent situations – mentions of sorting through many browser tabs (from “6 or 8” to “dozens”) 179 trying to stay on top of the story were frequent. As one participant described the broad ecosystem that he searched across: I had a couple of websites open, and I was surely using Twitter. That is what I usually do when I am trying to source news from separate places. I might even have a website like Al Jazeera or something which is really specific, running in one of the tabs, like a live news channel, because they also at times give some breaking news which you can hear. Most of it would have been through Google news, like searching Google news to get whatever is the latest available. Or a lot of these news websites have their own live threads running, so quite often I have those open, where as soon as they have an update you can, without refreshing, get the news. Live video streams were particularly common ways to keep tabs on the overall narrative, as news organizations repeated again and again what they had gathered from the event. However, to get up-to-date information, platforms like Twitter became central arenas to search for information from people on the ground. While using Twitter’s basic feed was out of the question, due to the amount of noise it introduced, using Twitter’s search function became useful by allowing participants to search across key phrases, locations, and emerging hashtags. One particularly controversial distinction was whether participants merely collected information or actually linked back to their sources. It was actually uncommon that people did not include any links; in some of these cases, it seemed to be that contributors would cite one source that they were transcribing information from, like a video feed or police scanner, or providing updates from their experience on the ground. Even though a majority of posts in the sample I looked at included many links (Figure 16), these were not always to particular news organization sources, but included links to tweets and even uncited image and video files. 180 Figure 16. The number of contributions that contain links to external websites or media. Few equates to less than one-third of content; some describes one-third to two-thirds; and many includes over two-thirds. Of course, when choosing sources, one of the most important factors appeared to be convenience and access. If a contributor quickly found a source that appeared trustworthy and seemed to be providing reliable information, that source would be included in the updates. For example, one contributor who was helping to aggregate information after the Boston Marathon bombing said that he went to a number of sources comprising both mainstream media organizations and social media platforms. When I asked about his news consumption habits, he did not pinpoint any in particular. During his aggregation activities, he relayed information from many online websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in addition to some online newspapers. He also added links to online livestreams and a couple of updates from local television reports. He described his experiences looking at sources as divided between all of these: [I was watching TV, and it] was news channels mostly, and then on my computer I also brought up the Reuters stream, and I think I brought up CNN even though my roommate was watching it in another room; but I just left that room and went to my computer. … Some of [the sources were] other commenters on reddit, some of it was my friends who 181 were closer to the marathon or who were paying attention as well, stuff like that. Just opened up my Twitter feed because I have a bunch of people that I follow, and they're all local – some of them are in Boston, some of them aren't – and just looked at and put it all together into one post, I guess. [Using Twitter,] I was just watching, no keywords, no searching. Pretty lazy in retrospect; but it works… Some participants identified a tension between trustworthy sources and speed. For example, Spencer, the moderator from /r/Europe that had helped aggregate information during the late 2015 Paris attacks, mentioned that at first the aggregation team fell back to the sources they knew and trusted: “In the first instance, we would go to places which we already trusted. Reuters, BBC News, these sorts of places which we know are going to provide substantive information.” Once he had established the core sources to set the context for the crisis, he continued to explore other sources to find out where the fastest developments were coming from: “[F]rom there, you can branch out and say go to a journalist who works at BBC News… When you go to the journalist – that departure from BBC News to Twitter – that's when you start getting the latest information as well.” However, he noted that picking these individuals often fell back to trustworthiness: “You go for the journalists who worked for the reputable organizations, who were there on the scene or thereabouts, and it became quite clear, quite early on, who those were.” After identifying these people, he then would be able to rule out the people that were not helpful: We would then start discarding the unnamed people on Twitter and try to opt where possible for those journalists who had a track record not just prior to the event but during the event as it was unfolding, to see what other news organizations would pick up… As time moved on, especially in the first couple of hours you could see what people were saying was true. It was quite… self-selecting… In general, though, he described the process as emergent and subjective: “Collectively it was all of us sort of spitballing to work out what was the best but mainly BBC News, Sky News, Reuters.” 182 Sometimes participants relied on local news, and the explanations of their process seemed to operate in the same way. As someone local to the Paris attacks in late 2015, where French media were updating faster than other mainstream organizations, LolNaie1 explained that he relied on “mainly mainstream” media, but because it was a local event, he could easily rely on the name brand alone: “Since I’m French, I pretty much know what is the proper news source and what isn’t. I just looked at the name of the news like it was BFM, Reversion, Extra. These are pretty much known for being okay, I’d say. Like BFM has the biggest live coverage in such events most of the time.” On the other hand, if someone is reporting on foreign events, the use of local professional news organizations – or even individuals sharing news that they were experiencing – was more difficult. In an attempt to aggregate information about a political uprising in Thailand, another participant explained that he tried to find people reporting locally: “Right as soon as I was checking out the links and just using judgment on what was going to be a good source or not, looking back at this, I was trying to look at people who were supposedly on the ground and also people that were in Thailand and saying what they were reporting.” He explained, though, that he reverted to looking at mainstream reporters’ coverage because they were credentialed, and he could trust in what other sources they pointed to: “I was trying to use [big] reporters, if I saw [information] on the reporters’ accounts, I thought that they had some credentials, because they're corresponding on the ground. If they retweet someone, I knew then they were a good source.” In cases where the contributor did not primarily rely on mainstream media sources, they still used subjective judgments about trustworthiness. For Moussa, an African participant currently living in the United States, Twitter was the best source for his aggregation practices when contributing after the November 2015 Paris attacks, because he was able to find all 183 different types of sources in one location: “Twitter was definitely the best source, because it just combines like everything: you have newspapers, you have the reporters, you have people who are actually on the scene. … This was the quickest and more accurate, if you know how to pick sources.” When I followed up about which sources on Twitter he actually decided to use, he explained that he’ll focus on news organization’s accounts first, but he will investigate the Twitter accounts of people that seem to be local to the event: “I will look first at like verified sources… like a newspaper. But also look at, if it's not an official [organization], like someone who lives around the area. I’ll look at the previous tweets to make sure it's like the real person… before integrating what they are saying into the posts.” In the end, though, he relied much more on the information that mainstream media reported, because they would incorporate the perspectives of individuals at the scene into their own reporting (thus eliminating the need for him to take the time to investigate): “For the verified sources I'd say [my aggregated updates contained] around 95% of the verified sources… I'd say, for just random people, it was just a few, not a lot. Because most of them, you'd already have it reported with the news, so I'll just go to the news because you have lower risk basically.” Also reporting on the Paris attacks, MaximaxII in Switzerland described a similar scenario of updating based on information from Twitter; the best sources were “reporters from mainstream media” or “people on the spot… if they're constantly updating Twitter and tweeting what's happened, and they post pictures to prove that they're actually there.” The same process occurred for Cynthia, during a smaller scale event. She explained that – when aggregating updates about a neighborhood shooting in Los Angeles – following local people on the ground who were giving tweet-based updates provided higher quality information in addition to being faster than trying to find news updates via Google: 184 I went to Twitter and started doing a little bit of searching like hashtag searching like #westla, #shooting, whatever. I just started following users on Twitter and being like, “This person is in the building where the shooter is,” and here are some pictures… linking it back to reddit. … [Twitter] was the only other source that I used, and then I just didn't even bother Googling because I think I'm getting better information [on Twitter]. … [When I say interesting, if] there was like a picture or something that showed a little bit of the action or if there was more information that I wasn't seeing on the reddit site I would post it. Across many of the cases, it was clear that mainstream media presented a much more favorable type of source, because of its traditional perception of reliability and everyday sense of trustworthiness. Verifying Information In both cases, the reasons to include particular information revolved around personal preference with an eye toward what would be beneficial to audiences. Again, as I illustrated above, participants described their news values in terms of information that was important or relevant and from sources that were reputable and trustworthy. However, just because the sources are identified as reliable does not necessarily mean that all information from these sources is used, particularly in situations of moderate uncertainty. Kovach & Rosenstiel (2001) argue that verification remains part of “the essence of journalism” (71). In new media contexts, though, Hermida (2012) reframes verification as a set of literacies about information that “have been informed by the standards of routines, rituals, and practices set by print journalism” (4) that evolve to meet the needs of participants in networked systems. The motivation for verification is similar to journalism, in that participants expressed a need to serve their audiences. As I described in Chapter 4, people recognized that a large network of audiences was paying attention to their aggregated work. For instance, because he was concerned about people’s safety after the Christchurch earthquakes, alphaque asserted, “I 185 had to try and verify just so that I didn't send anyone to the wrong places. Verification could be difficult, though, particularly when relying on information provided by sources other than professional news organizations. Andy Carvin described a core tenet of social news gathering to me as requiring “a technical skill of knowing where to look and knowing how to analyze things,” because rumors or misinformation might constantly be circulating. Below, I walk through how participants described three main trends in evaluating and verifying information: triangulating between multiple sources, issuing edits or actions on published information (such as corrections, strikethroughs, warnings, and deletions), and relying on the wider network of people to help with evaluating and verifying information. Verification Through Triangulation Most of the early work for reddit aggregation volunteers consisted of finding and evaluating sources. When dealing with multiple and especially with many sources, triangulation – a term I use to describe the process of using multiple bits of information from various sources to judge the veracity of a development – was identified as an important consideration before posting particular pieces of information. F16KILLER was a three-year member of reddit and a young student in Mexico who liked to aggregate information in reaction to earthquakes (I frequently encountered him having worked alongside theearthquakeguy). When I asked about the process of doing triangulation and looking through possible sources, he described the need for multiple sources because sometimes the information posted is not correct: “I saw in some sources, not just one, what was happening and I posted it. I like to have several sources, not just one, because there are times that they can have errors or something like that.” Sometimes the availability of many sources meant that contributors would purposefully search across them out of ease of access. After the Aurora, Colorado shootings, shankee – an 186 American student and participant on reddit for five years – took on the task of updating information related to victims and developments at hospitals. He explained how reliable sources like reporters don’t always get news up on TV immediately, so you can go out and search for other reliable sources via different channels. In his recollection, he told me, “Well, on Twitter, it's hard because you get a lot of information from the local reporters, and one of the reasons that it hasn't been on TV yet is because it hasn't been verified. … [I]t's basically filtering out: just setting your Twitter settings to ‘all’ with either a hashtag selected or just a place.” He said that to find information about the victims, he relied on finding information across many different sources before he could find the proper numbers: I actually was accountable for doing a lot of the hospital work, like checking out how many people went to what hospital, and what their situation was. That's always an important aspect, of course people would want to know how others are doing, all the victims are doing. So I just followed the hospital Twitter feeds, hospital Facebook groups, the websites of the hospitals, because I knew that those were reliable. You have to of course filter on Twitter… people are like, “Oh I saw this,” and I think of course a whole lot of spam. When participants were unsure about particular pieces of information, seeing the same piece of information reported from more than one source was preferred. For example, excelsior_i in Pakistan told me that when finding information after a major local earthquake, “I was verifying in the sense that I was at least looking for two different sources that were telling the same thing.” This process of triangulation not only was used by individuals but also groups of people working together. Following the MH370 disappearance, de-facto-idiot said that he and mrgandw “still [tried] to correlate with all other news sources here before we post[ed] it out.” Some people rely on even more points before it can be seen as valid. BlatantConservative’s approach across many threads and live streams was to focus on a few to look for important new developments and then many more to confirm the information: 187 Generally, I try to tell people if you're using Twitter or any kind of not accredited news organization as a source, you wait until two people, two separate sources talk about it, to mention it, then you say it's unconfirmed. And then, if like a ridiculous amount of Twitter sources are reporting something like that, then you can basically treat it like it's confirmed. Especially if a lot of people say, “I saw it with my own eyes.” In some cases, matching information across multiple sources would lead to a delay in the information being posted on reddit. While speed was a crucial factor in motivations explained in Chapter 4, participants concern about incorrect information persisted, so waiting for confirmation remained important. For example, mrgandw said, “Every time a piece of news came in, I kind of wait five [to] ten minutes, and then you'd get confirmation through all these news sites. I think that really helped me filter out what's accurate, what's just sensationalism, what's important, what's not important and so forth.” MaximaxII also added additional waiting time so he could confirm information coming out from the November 2015 Paris attacks, though he mentioned that, for sources he liked, he would feel comfortable posting those immediately: I try to be a bit more cautious than I think most other contributors are. I don't post ... A lot of them see something and they immediately post it. I'll usually ... If it's from a good source, I'll post it straight away, and if it's from something that's a bit more doubtful, I'll try to at least see if it's not confirmed by any better sources, but usually I'll just type it out, wait for it to be confirmed just a bit more, and then send it off. Occasionally, contributors found triangulation via multiple sources difficult to maintain. Harrymuesli, a graduate student in the Netherlands, had aggregated information during the Charlie Hebdo hostage situation in Paris in January 2015. In his situation, using the live stream, he wanted to use multiple sources, but he also asserted that updating a live thread requires extra attention sometimes: “When you're posting news on any website, when you are posting news yourself, you always try to verify it by reading at least two and preferably three or more sources about the same thing but with live feeds that's harder to do because you're very busy all of the time.” 188 It is important to underline the nature of triangulation as a type of verification. Compared to the verification practices of professional journalists, these behaviors did not extend to looking for, identifying, and questioning particular sources involved in the event (Veenstra et al., 2014). Instead, because much of information aggregation is collecting information from a multitude of other sources as they report developments in the moment (whether confirmed or not), the confirmatory nature of triangulation plays strongly into verification practices for aggregation volunteers. Rumors, Uncertainty, and Problems in Triangulation Misinformation sometimes poses a problem for participants who relied on triangulation to confirm information before posting. After the disappearance of MH370, it was difficult to report on new developments, because so many pieces of speculation were floating around. Mrgandw explained that his process of triangulation was key to cracking down on rumors and uncertain information. He told me that situations like this are full of uncertainty: “Especially when nothing is known, like in MH370, you don't know what happens. There's lot of speculation… we made sure that there was no speculation or guesswork in the updates that we posted.” In the first step, he explained how he would follow multiple live reports from organizations: What I looked for [in mainstream news reporting] was a pattern of consistency, meaning I'd have all these live blogs open from all these major news providers. And if there was a big piece of news that started popping up in every single one of these guys’ blogs, I'd be like, “All right. This seems like it's a pretty important development or a good detail for people to know,” and I would post it. He also provided a delay to see if other organizations would report on particular bits of information that emerged: I would give it a little bit of a delay. I'd give it about 10 to 20 minutes to see if anyone else reported on it, because the news sites are pretty quick. Usually they'll post an update within about 10-20 minutes of the news being broken. What I would do is I would wait a 189 little bit, and as soon as I saw that every news station is reporting on this detail or fact, I would post it. He finally gave me an example of what he would try to avoid including in any of his updates: I would definitely have things that I cut out, like maybe one news station reported on, “Oh, a fisherman thinks he saw debris,” et cetera, et cetera, but no other news site would say it. … If it was something that wasn't confirmed across multiple news sites, using that as an example, like “Oh, Person X says he saw fireworks at the same time that MH370 went down,” or something ridiculous like that, then I would be like, “This isn't worth posting because it has no significance to the story whatsoever and it hasn't been confirmed either.” In some cases, though, mainstream sources disagreed on particular pieces of emerging information, so it made the process of triangulation difficult for aggregation contributors. In the case of a hostage situation in Paris, LolNaie1 explained how many sources were reporting the details differently. In this case, he provided some contextual information describing how the information might not be valid, demonstrating the kind of information processing that his readers would also be doing: [I wrote “I have no idea and it seems very weird” in Edit #4] because, at first, it happens often that you don’t get the same reports if you look at different sources… like maybe it wasn’t clear whether he had grenade launcher or something like this. Some sources said he had. Some sources said he had only a handgun. It was a bit confusing. … At some point like this, nobody said the same thing in multiple sources. It got confusing at some point. In fact, there were some situations in which contributors did not bother to do any kind of confirmatory process on the information they had gathered. For example, Cynthia (who was looking into a local crime) explained that by not “fact checking,” the potential for misinformation to spread around was particularly potent. She briefly said, “Now the problem [was] I wasn’t fact checking…,” and when I asked why that was a problem, she responded: Because I think that it might have added to some of the confusion in terms of where it actually was. People were trying to figure out where which street corner it was or what intersection it was at. There was a lot of speculation like if you look through the thread, 190 people were like, “Oh, it's at [Street Intersection 1]. No, it's actually at [Street 2]. No, it's actually on [Street 3],” or whatever. There was a little bit of confusion. Peva3 described their role as being “like a sieve,” only to filter information from sources that were doing the verification work on their own. He said, when aggregating information about a local gunman, that he was merely relaying information: “I wasn't actually out there, I didn't have sources, or anything like that. I literally was just processing what was coming in and posting that.” He confirmed that he didn’t have the abilities to do any kind of confirmatory work, and therefore relied on what news organizations were reporting: “I wasn't doing any sleuthing or detective work. I was pretty much saying, ‘They have been saying for the past little while that there are two shooters,’ as there almost always is at initial reporting of shootings, but that's what they were saying. That didn't come from me poking my head out the window and listening.” In some cases, volunteers felt like they did have a little bit of experience to help their filtering role. Drawing from his local expertise (described in Chapter 4), Raz in Romania explained that he could not do any actual journalistic verification: “There’s no way for me to verify the information. Period. Anyone that I would ask, [like] my friends from back home – ‘Hey, what's going on?’ – they would just tell me exactly what I was reading.” However, he said he could rely on his instincts and knowledge to at least inform his choices on what information to include: I took it at face value, but at the same time I kind of used my experience growing up in Romania. Kind of like, vet it for myself… Does that sound like something that would happen in Romania? And then I go, yeah, that could totally happen in Romania. That's kind of what I went with. Like I said, I lived out there for 20 years… So I just kind of used that as a vetting process for all the updates. Triangulation was important for some contributors even to consider whether information coming through mainstream media channels made sense or not. Peva3 described how he felt confident in some information because mainstream media was made up of groups of people that would check 191 it, allowing him to also use it as a baseline for other information coming from different channels like social media platforms: “Pretty much anything that I heard them say two or three times, or they said it on TV and someone else said it on Twitter, I posted.” He also said he could rely on the assumed professional routines of organizations in immediately posting some types of info: “If they put something on the banner on the bottom, and it stayed there for a while, I posted that, because it's gone through at least a few people to get that on the screen. If they were confident enough to report it, that's more than enough for me to post it.” Triangulation generally relied on mainstream media sources too, because organizations conducted verification in their own reporting, which participants perceived as reliable. In earlier explanations from participants, I illustrated how people described their trust in “good” sources, but a few participants explained their preference for professional or official sources of information because they could take it at face value and be quicker in posting that information without having to do any confirmation. An Indonesian contributor who aggregated information about a plane crash, said he did a bit of triangulation work: My main form of – it wasn't exactly verification – main form of ensuring what I posted was good was only sticking to the sources I mentioned earlier. The other one would be checking these sources against each other. If I thought this new piece of information is only from one source, I wouldn't automatically post it. Try refreshing maybe different points of my other sources and see if I could find that. … If I saw something on the local news I wouldn't immediately post that unless I got verification from other places. However, he did trust particular types of sources without going out of his way to confirm the information they shared: “The only time I only posted with only one source was if it was brand new and it was a source that I completely trusted, like Singapore aviation authority, sometimes the Indonesian authorities, depending on what the information was.” Across most cases, the sense of reliability in the sources’ information remained crucial. These cases relied on trust early on, but seeing their information reposted by other organizations 192 acted as a point of credibility. When he was participating during the Charlie Hebdo situation, harrymuesli told me, “I try to stick to… journalists… [but] even an independent person on Twitter can be reliable if they turn out to be reporting stuff that indeed is correct all of the time (like it turns out to be correct and is reported on other larger media websites later). Then you can assume that that person knows what he's talking about…” However, another participant explained that while people are willing to help, the information provided is not as reliable as – and sometimes is purposefully misleading compared to – referring to professional news reports. Across his various instances of aggregating for earthquakes and other crisis events, theearthquakeguy said that he was unsure early on if he could trust some people, “If I remember correctly, there was definitely some times where people provided information and I didn't necessarily believe them at first because it seemed too extreme, a couple of times.” In some cases, it played out all right: “I was kind of hesitant of actually doing it, but it had later ended up to actually be true so at that point, because it would be confirmed by a more reliable party like CNN or Reuters or someone else, who would be covering it live.” However, the difficulty manifests when people purposefully try to provide misinformation. Theearthquakeguy complained, “It can be really tough, trying to stay up-to-date, especially with all the different sources. Sometimes you'll have complete nutters come in and try to provide information that just isn't true, so I guess it's intuition and then you just kind of have to do your own fact-checking really quick.” Verification Through Feedback In other cases, contributors relied on the wider network of reddit users to provide feedback during breaking news events. This aspect of reddit’s network was a particular draw – and sometimes a surprise – for contributors, because other users would act as additional suppliers of 193 information or help correct particular details. This aspect of verification certainly hits on the peer production aspect of peer information aggregation compared to journalism, where the direct connections to audience members helped contributors do their work better. Once a contributor began posting information, the actual audience of a particular breaking news update thread could turn into a crowd-driven method for fact-checking and verification. In most cases, members of the audience added comments to the thread or, in an attempt to make their suggestion more visible, sent private messages to the contributing user or group. For example, during his Boston Marathon bombings aggregation, JP explained how the crowd helped him fill in the gaps with an unreliable police scanner website. He described the initial difficulty of tracking all the information, saying, “It got to the point where I had two Reddit thread tabs open. One was just my inbox and just scanning as people were sending me stuff. Then another one was the thread itself, so I could keep doing updates.” Once the event drew more attention to his contributions, he said many more people started to send him information: After a while, once it started getting bigger, anytime something happened, my inbox would just fill up with hundreds of people being like, ‘Did you hear them? They said this.’ Which was kind of helpful because at one point the scanner would start cutting out or I would lose it because so many people were hitting that site…people were just jumping in and were like, “Hey, that word that you missed, it's this word.” Although it meant he had to parse more information, he said it generally aided in his efforts: “Being able to verify that with 50 other comments that were saying the same thing, it was very helpful.” The benefit of these additional comments manifested in the ability of others to help promote content that was correct, using the affordances of the upvote system. De-facto-idiot explained how – in opposition to Twitter, where comments like that would simply be lost in the 194 waves of updates – reddit’s platform helped the crowd sort out the good from the bad information: The thing about Reddit that I like is – if there's something inaccurate in the link, or in the self post… – there's always going to be someone to call it out. … You don't get that on Twitter. There's no one to call it out, and if there is, you're not seeing it. The thing, also, is, if there are people calling out false news on Twitter, they ... they're not seen as much. If one guy just tweets, “This is false,” not a lot of people are going to see it. If someone comments on Reddit, “This is false,” and is upvoted to the top, practically everyone is going to see it, and it gets a much bigger voice in that sense. Many people relied on the larger network to provide feedback on posts but also supplementary feedback in the form of additional links to other content. Contributors sometimes used these citations to support unconfirmed information, usually in similar ways to triangulation of information directly from professional news sources or social media sites. As the MH370 information continued to come in, de-facto-idiot in Malaysia said that a fellow local helped keep track of information coming through one of the official press conferences: For this particular case, the user was a Malaysian… he sent me a very rough summary of what [was] happening during the press conference, so I just compared it with what the other major news resources [were] providing. Then when I [had] free time… I [went] through the press conference again, just to rectify whatever I'm missing… [that others sending in information were] providing for me. In some cases, locals emerged from the background to provide additional information, commentary, and checks on regional information. For example, theearthquakeguy recounted how when he was updating about an explosion in Waco, Texas, many locals who found the post began sending in particular bits of information: “[A]fter it hit about, I think it was 500-800 upvotes, all the information started coming from locals and other people close to sources.” In reaction to the San Bernadino shooting in December 2015, ctaggie explained to me how many people sent him comments and links, but this additional influx of information meant that he felt he had to confirm even more things. He said it was helpful in the end, but he did not 195 post any of it until he could confirm it with other, more-reliable sources: “I kind of just evaluated everything how they came to me. I tried to make sure that things were credible before I put them on. I definitely got people telling me that they a source here or a contact there, and they had this information, but until I could confirm it from multiple people, or a news source, or over the police scanner, I decided not to.” Other contributors mentioned similar challenges related to paying attention to the additional information, particularly conflicts about keeping their eyes on the event itself. When JP was aggregating information from the constant updates of a Boston police scanner, he claimed that the only way for them to get other information was through the network. He said, “Between going through all of this and listening to the scanner and updating everything, I didn't have time to go anywhere else.” However, just as ctaggie explained above, he still could not entirely rely on this information immediately and decided to wait to see it appear in other, reliable sources: “Whenever there would be some link that had more information, usually it would come from a couple people. If I saw a link to CNN for one person, I would keep it in the back burner. Once three or four people started sending it to me, I would take a moment and look into it.” In the case of MH370, mrgandw criticized some of the information people commented or sent, but he said that others would jump on top of those pieces of misinformation to point them out for other readers: “You know, not in the comments sections, because people were very, very, quick to jump on speculation, and there was a lot of people posting ... I would go in and check out the links that people were posting, certainly, but a lot of it was unconfirmed and a lot of people were also posting just for the sake of posting and be like, ‘Hey guys, something new just happened!’” Again, though, in a few of the cases, he made sure to check out other sources to 196 confirm for himself whether the information was correct or not: “I would also observe other Redditors' reaction to it, kind of like, ‘Oh, this is unconfirmed. This has been confirmed,’ but in the end I would go into those links, read the story, then go back to all those other news sites and be like, ‘Okay, this has appeared or hasn't appeared.’ If it did seem like a pretty big thing, then I would post it.” Criticism occurred in the opposite direction too, when contributors included information that might not be appropriate to post (at least according to those reading the information). BlatantConservative experienced this wave of criticism after including some incorrect information in one of his updates: I can't remember what I actually posted, but it was kind of like half a crazy conspiracy theory. But it made sense to me at the time. And then I immediately got like 40 people messaging me. They were like, “Hey, that's kind of like not news.” And so I basically immediately… retracted it. Yeah. That was weird. And so I apologized. I'm like, “I'm sorry.” But now I know not to do that and basically I only post sourced stuff. The feedback of others not only to contribute new or similar information but also to call out misinformation played a crucial role in aggregation practices for some participants. This network-based feedback process also demonstrates how traditional ideas of gatekeeping might not account for this fairly flexible role of a feedback provider, where a reader (gated) becomes activated to provide criticism to information posted (promoting them to a temporary gatekeeping role). Editing Contributions Finally, in order to be clear and transparent about their information aggregation practices, contributors would often make edits to the information they had previously posted. While posting uncertain information was controversial to some contributors, sometimes participants felt it was necessary to include particular points to inform potential audiences, even if the 197 information might not be correct. Uncertain information was tied up with decisions around particular sources, because even professional news organizations would discuss unconfirmed information during developing stories. When participants would include unconfirmed information, many would include a specific warning to readers. These warnings allowed readers to be more conscious about and cautious of the information, particularly when it was unconfirmed information that a mainstream news organization (with perceived bias) had reported. In his various experiences contributing to live threads, BlatantConservative explained that he will add markers to denote information that might not be entirely confirmed: “When I'm posting on live threads, if something's unconfirmed, I'll write unconfirmed in all caps and then what the news is…” The goal, he said, was to let people understand if a source was helpful: “I try to give an idea of how reliable the source is instead of just not including something… if that makes any sense.” It was common to see unconfirmed information reported by mainstream media organizations, particularly at the start of a developing event. Sometimes the unconfirmed content originated from a verified journalist or organization, and contributors still wanted to include that information. Kash_if said he was wary of misinformation but included a marker of what was confirmed or not: “In situations like these, a lot of wrong information also gets spread. Even from the mainstream sources I think, if the information is unconfirmed, I've added in the comment that it is unconfirmed. So… ‘Unconfirmed turn of events from Reuters.’” While others decided to wait for more confirmation (e.g., through triangulation) for particular bits of news, there were pieces of information that they felt comfortable sharing even when it hadn’t yet been confirmed. When he was aggregating during the Charlie Hebdo crisis, harrymuesli remembered that moderators would react to people posting uncertain information, 198 prompting his decision to wait out some instances of uncertainty: “I usually wait. I saw people a lot that just posted it, and if it really turns out to be untrue or nonfactual, then the other moderators would remove it or send a group message like, ‘This wasn't true; can you watch your sources?’ I usually wait and try to find out if something is really reliable, if I clearly doubt something is true.” However, if a particular point might be interesting to his audience, he would consider including it anyway: “The other way to tackle that is if it's interesting but not life threatening, like it's not that big of a deal, then you can also say unconfirmed reports – blah, blah, blah with blah, blah, blah – so they are aware of the new information you found, but they can also make up their minds if it's true or not. You can leave it in the middle.” Moderators, as just mentioned, have tried to enforce rules around not posting unconfirmed information. SlyRatchet, who had a lot of experience moderating other subreddits, said that moderator teams have asked aggregation volunteers to respect particular rules about posting only confirmed information; otherwise, they would inform participants that their contributions or their account would be removed: [We told users], “Could you not report that because it's unconfirmed?” Like the thing with the fire that was constantly going on. It was like, “There's no confirmation about this. It's uncertain. Please don't post this. We've done the one bit that we're going to say, and that basically it.” Things like that. If users persisted, I think we were just saying, “We'll remove you from this.” I don't think we actually had to, but we were aware that we could threaten to do that or that we could do that. He later went on to explain that moderators help maintain quality in the community by policing these kind of contributions in uncertain situations, because in many cases readers tend not to read the fine details of each post. However, he argued that moderators should ensure the best quality for their members: “People don't really pay attention to the sources. They could be being wildly misled; they could not be. I've always seen it as the job of the moderators to ensure that quality, and be like, ‘Actually, this is basically incorrect. We should not allow this. This is basically 199 incorrect, let's put a big, red flair on it that says: No, this is misleading in some way.’” He went on to say it was even a responsibility of moderators to do this kind of policing, especially in developing event situations. “I'm very happy doing that. I think it's what makes us one of the better large subreddits. … I just always see it as our job, as our obligation almost, to ensure that users aren't being misled. Especially in a time of crisis.” (For more details on moderator’s decisions around policing information, see Chapter 7.) Placing the Responsibility on the Reader An important takeaway from most conversations I had with peer information aggregation volunteers was that they all wanted to include as much information as possible so that the readers themselves could construct the news narrative and evaluate the sources and information on their own. In other words, volunteers on reddit put their faith in the audiences to be responsible for critical work, as critical audiences, rather than placing this responsibility on the reporters and editors of mainstream media organizations who were publishing most of the information they relied on. For instance, when Cynthia was in the U.S. searching for news about the late 2015 Paris attacks, she explained, “[Using reddit compared to the BBC] was more attractive because I had more control over the information that I was doing.” In England, SlyRatchet explained that while reddit isn’t necessarily the best news source, it provides the reader a starting point containing information from multiple sources, allowing them to explore that information on their own: “I would hesitate to rely on [reddit] in an important situation like that. It's certainly useful. In fact, I would say that assuming that you don't have to run, I'm fine getting most of my information from there. Also, going and fact-checking. Google something, or Google little bits of it and see.” In the end, he argued, readers might form a better picture of the event unfolding: “If a little bit turns 200 out to be wrong, then that'll put everything else in question. You can start to get a much more accurate situation.” Of course, in some cases, a contributor posted information that turned out to be incorrect and there appeared to be no consequences. In these situations, some contributions encountered no particular types of enforcement, and participants themselves didn’t seemed to be particularly phased. On the contrary, including corrections – and in some cases appending a “strikethrough” formatting on the inaccurate text – was enough to offset the perception of negative consequences for including the information to begin with. One contributor who only had a year’s worth of experience on reddit explained that appending corrections was a fast and simple solution: “I tried to [verify] as much as possible, but I didn't feel like it was 100 percent necessary. If something was wrong, I would change it pretty quickly. Either I was made aware of it or found out myself. I was able to correct that whenever I could find out.” Ltfuzzle backed up a similar sentiment, saying that adding in strikethroughs and warnings about corrections also helped people be aware and judge for themselves of how the information had evolved over time. I asked him why he wrote “Ignore above info. It is out of date” at the top of his post. He replied: I think originally I commented something, and at the time a lot of information was coming in very quickly. And I was watching TV reading all these different posts, and it was very unclear what was going on. As I was progressing, going through writing these updates, I realized, “You know what? I don't know if this information is right.” I just stopped. I was just like “Okay, I'll leave it there.” So it's not like you're deleting information: I can say this is wrong or I think it's wrong, crossing it out. It's like editing a paper I guess. People can see what I had written before, but if they read through they'll see that some things are true, some things aren't. In general, the values present in aggregation revolved around the idea that more information from more sources was better to contextualize the event as well as keep track of changes over time. Readers should be cognizant of what they are reading, said one participant; the point of 201 being transparent with many perspectives is for readers to remain aware, have a foundation on which to build their own judgment, and decide on the veracity of information on their own. Conclusion Drawing on the motivations and values of the last chapter, in this chapter I highlighted the processes of information production that make up the primary modes of peer information aggregation and ultimately the gatekeeping behaviors of aggregation contributors. The decisions that went into choosing and vetting information primarily revolved around issues of gatekeeping. In their role as gatekeepers, individual participants had to wager the best way to present information, and there appears to be no particular standardization in how people react to developing events when doing peer information aggregation on reddit. Importantly, though, the information production practices highlighted in this chapter – specifically around sourcing and verification – suggest that a lot of what aggregation participants rely on is the products of journalism, namely reports from news organizations or journalists. Though in the previous chapter, I highlighted how contributors distanced their work from that of mainstream news organizations, when looking for trustworthy information, they tend to fall back on journalists. Of course, even journalists are sometimes wrong, so participants employed tactics like triangulation to vet information as the developing event continued. But when acting as gatekeepers, there generally appeared to be a hierarchy of information flows, where aggregators depended on multiple mainstream media sources to recompile stories for different audiences. The apparent contradiction between aggregation participants’ claims about reddit as a viable alternative space (Chapter 4) and the evidence presented in this chapter pointing to a greater dependence on professional news organizations as primary sources in aggregation suggests that 202 the values present in established modes of media (e.g., television) may strongly influence how people go about making decisions about information in new media contexts. Still, there are novel forms of gatekeeping present in peer information aggregation. For instance, the networked participation of readers in providing immediate bits of feedback to the contributor illustrates one moment where the shifting roles identified by network gatekeeping complicate information sharing. While this feedback may not be unique to reddit, it shows how the platform provides visibility to particular pieces of information that result in novel high-tempo gatekeeping processes. Network gatekeeping theory then should consider the specific implications of network-based forms of widespread interactive gatekeeping that continues to be less common in traditional journalistic contexts. Though journalists encounter these interactions as they increasingly engage with audiences online, the question becomes how impactful those interactions become in their information production practices, compared to those who participate in peer aggregation (which as I have shown does change their behaviors). In the next section, Chapter 6, I look further at the complications of collaboration, and I turn to issues of visibility as a factor of platform design in more detail in Chapter 7. 203 Ch. 6: Collaboration & Coordination This third analysis chapter aims to answer the question, “How do participants collaborate and coordinate in peer information aggregation?” In the previous chapter, I examined the practices of individual peer information aggregators. In this chapter, I specifically look at how group collaborations around breaking news information aggregation augment and complicate the processes of information collection and dissemination. Because contributors to peer information aggregation occupy a fluid role as both gated and gatekeeper, the relationships between participants (the third dimension of network gatekeeping; Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) becomes key to how gatekeeping ultimately functions in aggregation contexts. Barzilai-Nahon highlights the role of reciprocity and linkage between participants as a key facet of network gatekeeping, focusing on the connections between individuals and how that impacts their behavior. What is important to note is that, in practice, during developing events, peer information aggregation fluctuates through changing membership, improvised practices, and especially variable levels and types of coordination. These elements of coordinated action therefore strongly impact the decisions made about the information, people, and behaviors that occur in gatekeeping. The goal of this chapter is to understand how participants are included or excluded, and the various constraints – from the global interest in developing events to the particulars of reddit’s platform design – that impact how people do aggregation work with the help of others. I especially investigate issues of coordination: how people communicate to work together on different information aggregation tasks and the various decisions that go into organizing multiple collaborators. Some models of coordination, such as “the model of coordinated action,” identify various dimensions of collaborations in completing computer-supported tasks (such as physical 204 distance, routineness of behaviors, and turnover of membership) to understand the intersections of design and behavior when pairs or small groups of volunteers attempt to work within the constraints of reddit’s platform (C. P. Lee & Paine, 2015). The observations and quotations raised in this chapter point to issues like coordination across time zones, deciding between reddit’s platform or third-party channels, and the policies around working with more and more people as participants move in and out. The model of coordination action provides a lens to understand how coordination shapes the relationships that affect gatekeeping practices, like who gets to contribute and how information gets shared across the platform. I also look at different types of coordination and how the differences between the temporary coordination of volunteers differs from the sustained coordination of moderators. Coordination within sociotechnical systems depends on a combination of explicit coordination (“direct communication and verbal planning”) and implicit coordination (“unspoken expectations and shared mental models”; Kittur & Kraut, 2008). Some platforms, like Wikipedia, are better designed to allow explicit coordination between members in specific shared spaces (e.g., “talk” pages; Viegas, Wattenberg, Kriss, & Van Ham, 2007). In other cases, like on reddit, members must coordinate in impromptu ways and find methods to manage communication in addition to maintaining quality information exchange (Nardi, Whittaker, & Bradner, 2000). The high-tempo nature of reporting on developing events, such as human emergencies or natural disasters, demands strong coordination around knowledge sharing and information processing. However, “groups lack pre-existing role structures and reputations and are unable to routinize practices or rely on prior expertise,” especially in impromptu collaborations between volunteers (Keegan et al., 2013, 597). In temporary teams, improvisation of social roles and task- oriented actions is common, as members negotiate reorganization in the moment (Kittur, Lee, & 205 Kraut, 2009). The “emergent response groups” identified by Keegan, et al., that react to developing events fall in line with the types of issues identified in the model of coordinated action, such as varied backgrounds, differing levels of prior experience, lack of routine, and flexible membership, and members of these groups must work together to define social roles that support the tasks at hand (Welser et al., 2011). As time passes, coordination amongst members appears to shift toward denser and more explicit forms of coordination, like proper discussion (Kittur et al., 2009), and in major developing events, unique team structures emerge (Keegan et al., 2012b). Urgency and uncertainty intersect to place demands on collaborators – especially in the case of distributed, online coordination – to adopt processes where the work of many participants are conducted by only a few contributors in order to be successful (Kittur & Kraut, 2008). Below, I explore three main areas related to coordination and collaboration: increasing the number of participants beyond one, types of coordination when working in larger groups, and the role that moderators play in organizing and collaborating on news-related topics. Coordination is important, because it allows us to understand the difficulties of successful information practices and the ways gatekeepers do not always have absolute ease of control over information flows. I first begin with a case study that illustrates some of these issues of coordination and collaboration. Case Study: Coordinating Information from MH370 In early March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport heading for Beijing. The flight never arrived, and for the following three weeks, intense search and rescue operations commenced, led by a coalition of international emergency responders and government organizations. 206 As the breaking news alerts were shot off, a (now deleted) user posted an article from BBC News to the /r/news subreddit entitled “‘Contact lost’ with plane, bound for Beijing, carrying 239 people.” 73 Shortly following this contribution, a young university student in the United States, who goes by the handle mrgandw, began adding updates to a comment, collecting small updates from CNBC, CNN, and other mainstream media organizations. He explained to me, “The actual news story itself, there was a link on /r/news and one on /r/worldnews. I saw the one on /r/news first, so that's just kind of the one I went into. Just go with the flow of traffic, I guess.” Eventually he added citations to Chinese news agencies and other sources, continuing to update into the night for over 6 hours. After his first few updates, another user commented, “Thank you for what you have been doing. I can only imagine how emotional it must be for you and your team. I hope you get a good rest tonight, my friend!” Mrgandw replied, “Thank you so much for your kind words. My ‘team’ is only me! :).” 74 Mrgandw didn’t stop there. Over the course of the next fifty-five days, he continued adding detailed updates to new, individual posts in the /r/news subreddit. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. Starting with “Comprehensive timeline: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370,” 75 he worked with another reddit user, de-facto-idiot, to curate information from dozens of sources and stay up to date on the latest information announced from government agencies and news organizations. De-facto-idiot, living in Malaysia, continued to provide comments to mrgandw’s subreddit posts, which the latter would integrate into his submissions. Mrgandw recounted that, at first, there was no explicit coordination between the two, but because of the helpfulness of his counterpart’s contributions, they connected and began to work together. First, he explained to me his surprise 73 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1zutek/contact_lost_with_plane_bound_for_beijing/cfx70u2 74 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1zutek/contact_lost_with_plane_bound_for_beijing/cfxgjyj 75 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1zviu0/comprehensive_timeline_malaysia_airlines_flight/ 207 when another user reached out to help: “When I started the timeline, [de-facto-idiot’s] first comment was on my first timeline post, and it said something like, ‘Hey guys, I'll fill in for the OP while he's asleep.’ I was like, ‘Okay. That's pretty cool.’” De-facto-idiot appeared to help out in each timeline that mrgandw created, helping out in down periods: “He would fill in the gaps where I wasn't available, like I had school or I was in bed or something like that. Then I sent him a message. I'm like, ‘Hey, this is actually working out really well. You have the local perspective. It really helps when you fill in the gaps for all these people who are actually getting in and looking at our timeline any times that I can't.’” De-facto-idiot explained his side of the story to me, stating how local expertise provided him an advantage and a motivation to get involved. He explained how mrgandw’s post was just “on the front page” and he had “just followed the threads,” until realizing that parts of the timeline had gaps, particularly “during the daytime in Asia.” After he reached out (Figure 17), de-facto-idiot explained how the process continued: I just volunteered to step in. … We started the collaboration on the second day, I think. Before I started this, … there is a lot of conspiracy theories over in Malaysia, and all across Asia, there’s a lot of political conspiracies, so for me, it's more like I was trying to, let's say, do my part in putting the record straight, right? Because there are victims, families… so I mostly just concentrated on that particular thread. 208 Figure 17. A moment of early coordination between mrgandw and de-facto-idiot in the comments of a reddit thread. Over a few weeks, they each coordinated times when the other could be active, taking advantage of their disparate time zones to cover an appropriate amount of the workload. Mrgandw explained the convenience of international distance, saying, “[T]hat lined up really nicely with when he was up and about, because he's on the other side of the world… so we would tag team.” Eventually, they decided that it would be easier in the long run to try to avoid reddit’s technical editorship limitation – only one person may update a submission – because mrgandw had to spend time evaluating and copying over the comments that de-facto-idiot was adding to his threads. So they created a joint account, mh370updates. Mrgandw explained to me how easy it was: “[J]ust having a centralized account that we could both log into and post information as needed. Super convenient.” De-facto-idiot explained the same rationale, where it was always easy to talk about what changes to make and what goals to aim for, but ultimately creating a shared user account made those collaborations even easier: “Mostly it's just around a certain 209 policy: I'm covering Asia; he's covering [the] American timezone.” He also detailed how they decided to coordinate a similar way of adding updates: “We did talk about the tone: we want to present the facts right. We decided not to pick sides, this and that… [use] just plain text.” The joint account helped solve the problem of being “not really productive, because I'm posting a new [update], so he had to copy and paste and put my credit.” He explained that they were “Not doing it for karma,” so opening a joint account was a clever and logical next step. However, this collaboration led to obstacles. Both of them found the back-and-forth communication on one account unique and interesting, but even though they found a method suitable to collaboration between two people, it became complicated as they had to communicate about how to hand the thread off to avoid overlapping with each other. At first mrgandw was worried, because “if we're editing the same post at the same time, then whoever saves it last, there's this change that gets written, so I was worried that we would end up overwriting each other's text a bunch of times.” However, their physical distance and asynchronous communication allowed them to coordinate in a strong pattern: “Thankfully that didn't happen, actually, because it's like I said, the time difference was big enough that he could be active when I wasn't and vice versa. It just kind of was a natural ‘partnership,’ if you want to call it that.” The way in which they communicated relied on explicit coordination, particularly when their communication synchronized: “There were times when we were interacting at the same time. I think that's also part of how we made sure that someone's edit didn't overwrite the other person's.” He detailed their approach using an aviator metaphor: I'd be like, “Hey, I'm going to put in two more updates, and then I'll hand it over to you.” In aviation, when you're with an instructor and you’re switching control of the plane… the instructor says, “Okay. The plane is yours,” and the student says, “All right. It's my plane,” and then the instructor says, “Okay. You've got the plane…” We would do that. When we were handing it off, I'd be like, “All right. I've posted this update,” and then I 210 would say, “Okay, I posted the update. The thread is now yours,” and then he'd be like, “All right. I've got the thread from here.” In times when they did communicate during the same time period, he mentioned, “We would talk about the day's events and the updates and what we thought was going on, and then, of course, we'd discuss logistics of the threads and so forth. There was a little bit of overlap, definitely, but otherwise it was a very smooth transition handing off the thread to each other.” Eventually, a third reddit user turned into a collaborator: naly_d, a (then) journalist at a New Zealand-based professional news organization. Mrgandw explained how naly_d contacted them to provide special, faster information that he had access to within his organization: When de-facto-idiot and I made the joint account, [naly_d] reached out to us… He kind of had a lot of firsthand information as well, and so he kind of became our inside scoop. We were able to verify him because obviously he provided proof to his own accounts and that sort of thing, but what was cool is he would report on something… he kind of had an advanced heads up. The biggest surprise came from them when he produced information that nobody had heard about: “I know it takes a while for news to kind of propagate throughout the major news sources, but he would send us a piece of news and then that would all of a sudden pop up on all the other news sites, and it was like, ‘Wow. Okay. This guy's trustworthy and verifiable.’” He then explained how the speed of naly_d’s information sources gave them a distinct advantage of speed: “What was cool about that is we were able to post a lot of updates that he was getting before most of the major news outlets had even reported it. It was definitely a huge advantage. … He was definitely an invaluable asset to our team.” In particular situations, like official live streams of press conferences, mrgandw collected this extra information under the table and included it in his updates: “I think what it was is a lot of the live streams to those press conferences were not available to the public, but he would have access to them. He would have 211 access to them, so he would pass along snippets from the press conference that no one was disseminating just yet. We were kind of able to get news as it happened, if you will.” Speaking to naly_d, he explained to me how he acted as a point of support for the duo, but he also had to coordinate with them so that his sense of support was trustworthy and dependable. “I enjoyed very much chatting to them. It was because of the hecticness of it all. It was always quite [short] ... you know, here is some information for you and then a thank you.” Again, because of the physical distance, they utilized explicit coordination in asynchronous ways to stay on top of each other’s duties: A couple of times, often it would be that I was finishing work or starting it, I'd drop them a line every time I to work to say, “Hey, I'm on deck, and I'll let you know if anything big happens.” Likewise, when I was heading home, I'd say, “I'm off.” Just so that they wouldn't sit there being like, “Okay, we've got this information, but we haven't heard from him, so I don't know if it's legit.” On another note, de-facto-idiot also explained to me why they did not take on any additional people, stating that it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to coordinate people given the limitations of the system they had already encountered: “[I]f we involve more collaborators inside, then we have to do different styles, and we have to come to agreement that who should do what, when should you do it, this and that. … We had to keep the format and the tone of the thread to be consistent across all different data.” Further, once naly_d had joined, the information coming in from news organizations and the government was slowing down: “Once we got past the third week, so it was like very very slow news, so we never considered taking more people and helping [with] that. We did ponder about that possibility during the second week I think, but it wasn't worth the hassle.” 212 The fascinating context behind this collaboration that played out across over 70 detailed posts 76 (and potentially more comments) is that none of the collaborators knew each other: they merely used reddit’s platform to find and coordinate with each other. Mrgandw recalled that the personal and emotional connection became a daily part of the collaboration. He recollected, “I had no idea who [de-facto-idiot] was at first, but as the whole process went on, obviously we messaged each other back and forth. … There was a little bit of getting to know each other. I didn't remember the details, but we talked about where we work and what our plans and that sort of thing. Going into it, I had no idea who he was.” Further, making connections with others in distant places helped mrgandw to learn different strategies for approaching information evaluation. He said, “I tried to get a bit of a local perspective from him as well just because definitely his country was pretty affected by that, just because there's so many ... Well, there's politics involved, like ‘What are they telling us? What are they not telling us?’” This case study reveals a number of poignant factors related to coordination and collaboration – across both ordinary users and moderators – that I explore in this chapter: the decision to include (or limit the number of) multiple people, the vetting of those people, and the implicit and explicit forms of coordination that emerge from those collaborations, particularly related to the platform’s limitations. The long and complicated process to aggregation information related to MH370 depended in large part on the impromptu and (at least initially) temporary contributions and decisions by these two reddit participants. The relationship of these three epitomizes the kind of successful collaboration that can emerge within reddit’s community, and it points to how complicated gatekeeping remains (i.e., having to choose the right information, verify the proper people, and recognize how the platform limits information 76 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1zviu0/comprehensive_timeline_malaysia_airlines_flight/cfz1hpu 213 dissemination). Below, I go into more depth across many case studies to investigate how participants negotiate the relationships of network gatekeeping when participating in peer information aggregation on reddit. Adding More People Multiple people working together is not necessarily required when aggregating information during developing events on reddit. However, as we saw in previous examples, and especially in the case of MH370, collaboration between a handful of – or even a few dozen – users can emerge from initial contributions, as people make requests for help or volunteer to contribute alongside or after others initiate the task. This section delves into the impact of scale in breaking news collaborations on reddit: does more people help or hinder these collaborations? Below, I explore two facets of larger groups: inclusion (choosing to embrace additional participants) and vetting (the process by which people are judged for inclusion). Inclusion & Vetting Inclusion of multiple people seemed to run on a spectrum: for some participants, opening up the work to other volunteers was extremely flexible and open-ended, whereas other participants conducted a vetting process where potential contributors were evaluated. These decisions depended largely on the complexity of the task, the need for help, the commitment to the task, and convenience of available and willing volunteers. When participants explained that they were willing to include more people to help, some were hesitant about who they decided to bring in. As we saw in the MH370 narrative, trustworthiness played an important factor in how initial participants decided to accept others. If a new participant was able to provide solid and dependable information from the onset, they were more likely to be seen as valuable and continue to help out over a longer period. 214 Sometimes a participant did not actively search for other people, merely creating an opening for others to jump in and continue the updating task. For example, one interviewee who had spent hours tracking developments during the Boston Marathon bombing incident recounted that he had to stop to eat. He returned, but while he was gone, “the interesting thing was someone actually did pick it up, because I mentioned I had to go do something… someone actually picked up for the time being while I was gone. … I just said, ‘I can't be following this anymore. If anyone wants to pick up the pace, they're more than welcome to.’ I'm a one-man army. There's no coordination with anyone else.” JP, who volunteered after the Boston bombing incident, also described his difficulty with updating for so long and having to turn it over to whomever would be able to contribute. In one instance, he handed it over to a specific person (cedargrove) who reached out to him to ask if he needed help. He first mentioned to me that he had to leave – “At one point I had to leave, and I was gone for maybe an hour or two. … I still had work; this was a work night for me. I had already been up for 24 hours at this point, and it was about time for me to go into work.” – and then he got a message about volunteering. He recalled, “Basically, I left, and somebody messaged me about doing another thread, or I was talking with somebody, and I was like, ‘I have to go do some stuff, so I have to leave for an hour or two.’ Then somebody else took over the thread, which I believe was /u/cedargrove.” Upon returning, JP explained, he evaluated the work that cedargrove had done as acceptable, and they traded the task back. Later on, after getting tired again, JP handed it off once more to other volunteers (who continued updating information over the course of three more large update threads). Throughout the entire process, though, he said that there was little attention paid to who the people were that would take over. He explained: 215 There wasn't much research or anything into it at all. A bunch of people were just like, “Do you need any help?” … There wasn't any vetting. I didn't go through [cedargrove’s] profile and make sure he was up and up or anything. I was just like, “He's taking over. He's going to do his own thing.” I let [all of] them take over how they wanted. I didn't supervise them or anything which, in hindsight, doesn't sound like the best idea, but, at the time, it was what I needed. On the other hand, some users specifically went out of their way to ensure that the people they were including would make valuable contributions. Because reddit provides profiles that aggregate recent posts and tally total karma scores, these profiles can act as markers of reputation for participation in reddit’s various communities. Anthony, one of the many contributors during the Boston Marathon bombings, explained that when he wanted to include more people, he used these profile traces in his decision process. He highlighted high karma and even specific notable usernames: There were a bunch of people that volunteered. I looked at the people that had really high karma scores, people that had been participating on reddit for a very long time. They had a reputation to uphold… [S]ome of these people were well known, and some of these people were well known on reddit, and they mod at multiple forums or multiple subreddits. I basically said, “You guys can be the next ones that start the thread, and I'll post the link to your new thread at the end.” While Anthony explained that he “gave them my list of sources that I had gotten from everybody else in the thread,” as soon as he had passed on the responsibility, the updates were largely out of his hands. First, he made some simple calculations: “I only vetted through three [people]. I knew that if each one of them could handle it for as long as I did, say 5 hours or so, then we were good for the next 15 [to] 20 hours.” However, he set a cutoff for himself, saying, “If it kept going after that – which I didn't foresee, I didn't think it would continue going after that… it turns out we got 21 live update threads in the end – I was going to leave that up to them. Once I relinquished the first thread, it's not in my hands anymore.” 216 Anthony explained that the process of exchanging was fairly explicit. Uniquely, he collected resources to hand off to the new participants and provided tips on how to deal with particular issues like evaluating new information or looking at particular sources: “Whenever I was preparing to hand it off I had a big, pre-typed, message, ready to send off. … I did have a post that I had sent to them that was basically, ‘Here's what I've been doing, be prepared. Your inbox is going to be lighting up.’” When we talked at length, he provided some details about his approach: There were a bunch of things that I said, but one of them, for instance, was, “If you notice 5 people say the same thing at the exact same time, then you might want to look into that.” …Then I said, “Keep a list of all Twitter feeds that get things right because they're people you might want to use in the future. Reporters are very handy. They've been very interested in what we're doing. They're looking at us as some sort of assignment desk, in a way, and we're looking at them as ways to get information from official sources to make this a little bit more real.” Because these participants were updating post and comment threads, they largely had editorial say over what information would or would not be included. In the next section, I look deeper at communication between participants to see how decision making around sourcing and information contributions were negotiated (if at all). Coordinating Groups Communication between volunteers in peer information aggregation shapes how participants figured out how to contribute. Within online mediated platforms, there are two frameworks to understand how people approach tasks: explicit coordination, where participants directly communicate with one another, and implicit coordination, where participants take on leadership positions to shoulder the burden of tasks that might otherwise “require high coordination between contributors” (Kittur & Kraut, 2008, 3). The editorial benefit of having one or a few people leading a larger groups means that fewer conflicts occur with other people when 217 assigning specific tasks or debating the variable merits of certain approaches. Still, a large group of participants can confront a large task by splitting up the work. Because this kind of coordination is difficult to conduct, participants can explicitly negotiate who does what work. In the case of peer information aggregation on reddit, explicit and implicit coordination varied between groups, taking into account group size, the particular format of the updates, and the size of the event. In larger groups, though, implicit coordination seemed to occur most often, posing problems like miscommunication that may have impacted the ultimate quality of how information was contributed. Explicit Coordination Explicit coordination focuses on direct communication between members of the group working on a particular task. Explicit communication appeared to occur more often when dealing with groups of contributors beyond two or three people working together. When three or more people decided to coordinate tasks, the reddit platform usually limited the ways in which volunteers could communicate with each other. However, participants generally dealt with the limitations by messaging directions to each other over private messages. When asked how people explicit coordinate with each other when they don’t know each other personally, one participant bluntly stated, “just private messages.” In other cases, contributors adapted the platform to their needs. For example, when any participant adds a “/u/” in front of a screen name (like /u/alexleavitt) when posting a comment, the system will automatically send that user account a private message alerting them about the mention. During the late 2015 Paris attacks, BlatantConservative used the username mention feature to his advantage as a way to message instructions about what needed to be done to other people. He also noted that this feature had not always been available, so using it during a developing event was particularly 218 useful in orienting specific individuals’ attention to particular posts or tasks: “[The feature] pings them, and they get a notification that somebody tagged them in something. So I did that during the Paris threads. I actually went like, ‘Hey, you two, there's something going on and I can't take care of it.’ That also makes the whole process a lot more [smooth].” The case study of MH370 detailed similar adaptations of the platform for explicit coordination. By creating a shared account, mrgandw and de-facto-idiot were able to work directly in relative sync each other, trading off control of the account (as they described, like aviators do for controlling an aircraft). In other cases, contributors tried to organize outside of the platform. When participants knew how, they tended to coordinate their activities using third-party communication channels. IRC – Internet Relay Chat – was a popular space for organizing information and carrying out conversations. Generally, people that have used IRC or other chatrooms find value in coordinating in these exogenous spaces (even though it requires additional technical knowledge and time to use them): “[T]rying to actually get a bunch of people all organized when providing that service, you do have to kind of collaborate in some from and IRC is fantastic in that.” The value, of course, is that when trying to organize multiple people, everyone can agree on what tasks are assigned to whom: “[W]henever you're doing a live thread, you can communicate with each other. Have you posted this? No. Okay, I'm going to post it. No one else post it.” Not only does a separate communication channel allow people to share potential tasks, but they can also see what each other participant is working on. For example, one group of participants created an IRC channel to decide who would work on what when collaborating on a live thread for the San Bernadino shootings (December 2015), because there were many sources to follow but no one person could take on all the work by themselves: We decided to make an IRC chat because now we had audio from 3 different sources. We had audio from the police scanner, we had the police chief who was speaking live, and 219 then we had the helicopters and the new anchors that were commenting. I can't listen to 3 different audio feeds at once and get information from all of them. We essentially decided to split them up. I basically stayed on the CNN. I mean, I kept my eye on both of the other things just in case there was something major, but we had to split that up because it's impossible to keep appraised of 3 different situations at the same time. In another example, shankee explained that during the aggregation period after the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings, he and others coordinated different tasks for finding information from multiple sources, which were collected into a number of post submissions edited by one user: “I reached out to [integ3r] on IRC actually; he made an IRC channel for people to just report in. … I messaged him directly and we created a private IRC with four people, and we just all had our computers open, different Twitter feeds open, a Twitter group, whatever.” IRC in particular helped with larger groups too. In some cases, like when many people – including teller8 – were trying to contribute to a live thread about the Ferguson, Missouri protests in November 2014, up to a dozen people participated in the IRC forum. Implicit Coordination Implicit coordination focuses on “unspoken expectations and shared mental models” (Kittur & Kraut, 2008, 3). In the last chapter, I detailed one example of implicit coordination: crowd vetting of information, where contributors typically encountered a lot of other users volunteering bits of information sent in comments or private messages. In this section, I provide more examples, particularly within the cases of live threads. In most cases I encountered, for ordinary users, implicit coordination occurred more often than explicit coordination, especially for people that did not know each other. However, moderators appeared more likely to use explicit coordination means for organizing their teams and other participants. 220 The scale of coordinated groups impacted how tasks were accomplished. In cases of urgency, when larger groups emerged, it became more difficult for each person to consult everyone else. Therefore, it was likely that a smaller group of people would do a lot of the work, upon which other participants based their contributions. For example, one person could act as the editor in a comment thread, as in the case of MH370 when mrgandw largely played the role of editor for the contributions of others. This editorship structure was shaped by the requirements of reddit’s platform – namely that only one person can post information within a particular submission – so a primary volunteer might coordinate posting while others vet information from a variety of sources. Small groups relied on implicit coordination because of reddit’s platform limitations. When shankee was helping source information after the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings, he explained how integ3r, the leader of the effort who was posting the threads where the summaries of updates were collected, coordinated three others in the group. He explained that there was little conversation, saying, “[W]e didn't really communicate that much. We had the IRC, but most of it was just each of us just collecting information ourselves and that overlapped of course.” Instead, integ3r acted as a leader, upon which others looked for guidance to conduct their own work: [integ3r] was the only one at first that posted it. We just gave him the information, he himself didn't really account for a lot of the information. Yeah, it was basically just each of us… just sifting through information. And just posting like a Twitter link or what we’ve heard on News Line or 9 News. Then he would read that, would just use it as his own rough timeline, and just add things that he thought were important. I think I had a few posts in the thread itself, but none of them were new information that weren't already posted by [integ3r]. 221 The lack of communication did not mean that coordination was not occurring. Instead, the implicit nature of this coordination resulted in many people basing their contributions off of the primary contributions of a leader and editor. The examples above primarily revolved around posting comments or contributing to live threads in smaller groups. In more recent years, with the development and widespread adoption of the live thread feature, volunteers have used the live thread more often, increasing the number of members to form larger groups when conducting peer information aggregation. While I do not explore the implications of design differences in this chapter (I discuss the implications of design mostly in Chapter 7), it is important to bring forth the difference that the live thread brought to collaborating on information aggregation, because the feature could support an increasing size of members in groups, resulting in different dynamics of group work. In larger groups, explicit communication was actually not particularly common. If there was one user acting as an editor or leader, it was easier to guide the group toward a common goal. Teller8, who was updating during the Ferguson protests, explained how one leader (TheDeech) coordinated a larger group, providing tips and resources on what to do. His guidance allowed the group to have detailed conversations about what tactics they would employ. Teller8 told me, “As soon as I joined the subreddit, TheDeech kind of sent me a private message and was like… ‘You can't be biased when you make posts. You can't give out identifying information, because that could get someone killed or injured or something.’ He said, ‘But like if you're going to post Twitter updates, you need to make sure that they're from verified accounts.’” He continued, detailing the various resources compiled for the other members of the effort: “He sent me a link to a page that compiles a bunch of reliable Twitter sources. He told me to keep an eye on that and refresh with that. He gave me a link to a bunch of the scanners, bunch of sources that 222 I could get the information from.” However, Teller8 did mention that a few times the group conversed about what kind of decisions they wanted to make: We had discussions about what types of things we should post. There was even one point where we got, there was like a video of someone being shot in the video, we didn't know if we should have posted that. We did eventually decide to go ahead, but we did put a warning message on the post to make sure that people who were clicking it were actually aware of what they were getting into. In the case of live threads, as the number of participants increased, the speed of updates was faster, and there were more sources contributed. Further, coordination through IRC occasionally occurred, but because people were frequently added during the progression of the event, it was difficult to coordinate new contributors being added to the IRC chatroom while simultaneously watching the new members’ activity within the live stream. However, ultimately, all of these changes led to more complications. Participants in these larger groups tended to not communicate with each other. Instead, it appeared that participants would form mental models of others’ work, identify gaps, and pursue those as personal goals. Sometimes volunteers felt like the lack of communication worked out in the end. As one interviewee described his participation in a live thread about an airplane crash, “My only communication was in the beginning when I was… maybe two or three minutes back and forth with the person who added me. After that… we never communicated.” It appeared that this impromptu process resulted in few duplicate updates: “I think people were working well together even without communicating, because there was no blatant duplication of information. If someone posted something, the others would support it with other information that was relevant to it and wouldn't just end up duplicating the same information.” When talking about his collaboration with theearthquakeguy, F16KILER told me that there was a similar lack of coordination: “There was no communication between us, between 223 /u/theearthquakeguy, or the other people on the live thread.” He said that, even without it, the pair and others in the live thread figured out how to coordinate across a lot of distinct sources successfully: “We only posted what was something important at the time that nobody else post. We didn't have communication, but I think we did manage to put the news as they were coming without repeating them, and with a lot of confirmed cases, confirmed news.” Because communication decreased as the number of participants increased when peer information aggregation was conducted in a live thread, participants had to rely mostly on mental models of what they should do based on cues from the contributors of other participants. Thinking back on the coverage of the November 2015 Paris attacks, PabstyLoudmouth explained that everyone waited to see how they could contribute based on others’ work, especially in a high-tempo context like the Paris crisis: “You just kind of wait and see. There's really no communication between us pretty much during the whole thing, because when you're looking at so many different things, it's hard to communicate.” Participating in the live thread during the November 2015 Paris attacks, I personally also witnessed the blatant lack of communication occurring between contributors, especially as new participants were added continuously over the course of a few hours. The lack of coordination resulted in quick updates, but in most cases, new updates from two or three different sources would basically contain the same information (possibly duplicating effort where explicit coordinatation could have directed these participants to other crucial information work). The mental model process meant that participants still had to synchronize in some manner, and they tended to describe it as finding gaps in what others were reporting. For example, excelsior_i illustrated that during some earthquake information aggregation, “There was no coordination. You just look at what is being reported, and if it's something that you 224 already read, and it's something latest, then you don't just post it. But if it's something you saw, and it's unique, and it hasn't been posted, and you think it brings out news, then you just post it.” Harrymuesli further explained how updating information in this high-tempo manner – such as his experience reacting to the Charlie Hebdo attacks – required keeping a close watch on others’ updates until gaining the opportunity to contribute something new: “[I]t's a fluid process… I just try to make assumptions what other people are doing. Usually you're pretty right. There's usually one or two people who follow Twitter, and then other people following very clearly other live streams, etc.” He asserted that without moderators, participants can only try to predict what information they should post as soon as they find it: “There was no chief moderator. There was no clear person in charge. You just try to anticipate what other people were doing and more than that try to post one or two or five line comments on the news of what you found as soon as you find it. You're like, this is new and then within a minute you type up what you do and post it.” He concluded that it becomes a sort of marathon: “In that way, it's kind of a race as well where you try to be ahead of the others.” Of course, the attention to speed introduces problems. This race to post the first updates from new, dependable sources became a symptom of confusion for some people, as it was difficult to necessarily vet information coming through. Participants noted an increase in this difficulty due to the constant activity in live threads, leading to fatigue and disorganization. In his experience across many live threads, BlatantConservative explained that “One of the problems is … there's not really a discussion place for those of us who are involved in this kind of thing to discuss tactics and like policies when things aren't happening. And when the things are happening, it's way too busy to do that. There aren't really a lot of rules.” Again, just as I highlighted in the information production chapter, the lack of standardization in peer information aggregation practices leads to impromptu responses by 225 volunteers, complicating the ways in which gatekeeping occurs around the selection and circulation of information. The lack of guidance from any individual or group of organizers was a major limitation in optimizing for the best coverage of a developing event. MaximaxII described how the lack guidance, like rules instituted by a leader, led to complication and confusion when reacting to the Paris attacks in November 2015: “That's complicated. There's no real thing to do it. I wish people would just use IRC or something, but it's complicated, because there's always a sense of urgency. You're always trying to read up and you're busy with that so you don't really have time to have some sort of chat behind. I think that's a missing feature actually.” He offered up the conflict that without rules people make quick judgments: “If there's a duplicate, you'll just either delete one, and there's no real rule about who deletes what, so it's complicated. I don't think that there's any [coordination] ... [I]f you're writing something and it's just been posted, then you'll try not to post it. Just edit it to just additions, not repeat what has already been said.” Maintaining Order Participants raised simultaneous and repetitive posting as the most common issue when there was little communication between volunteers. To counteract these issues of coordination, participants had to come up with new strategies for maintaining order within the live thread system, such as identifying repetitive information and editing or removing their own posts (or, if removing the posts of others, letting the information contributed first stay). When there were leaders or organizers of a live thread present, they tended to monitor the participants. One factor they took into account was information quality, and some participants who helped lead a live thread decided to limit the number of people updating at any one time. For instance, BlatantConservative was a contributor to a live thread early on, and therefore he 226 gained privileges to add additional contributors. He explained that he relied on people who were updating him with new information the most through comments and private messages, because they seemed like the most dependable and reliable people, based on what they had been sharing. He explained his decision: “I only add people to a thread when they've been really good at like private messaging me sources already. Basically when they're sending me as much sources as I'm finding myself, it's more efficient for you to just post these. … I get a lot of volunteers and a lot people private messaging me stuff. So, when I need help, I'll only add the people who have been helping me the most if that makes any sense.” He cautioned against adding too many people though, because it duplicated efforts in pointless ways. By tasking people to only provide information and sources to the people posting, it streamlined the process (and actually made it easier for readers to follow the live thread, because there weren’t endless updates refreshing the page): “But if there's too many people on the thread, a lot of the times, the same news will be posted like 8 times in the same second because a lot of people are using the same source. And this is just personal preference, but limiting it and then having people sending – like 5 to 10 people – sources. … It kind of makes it easier for the viewer. Makes it easier for us.” In other cases, the organizers would retain the larger amount of people and monitor the content. Just as I explained in an earlier chapter, participants valued transparency, especially when there was possible misinformation spreading around, so when contributors wanted to remove posts from a live thread, they usually made sure to cross them out rather than delete them. Teller8 told me that his team of contributors occasionally duplicate information, but if they did, it was OK, because they could just add a strikethrough: [B]ecause it was going so quickly, sometimes people would double post. Like two people would post the same thing at the exact same time. And if that was the case we would just have one person would use, I think they used crossing out. We never deleted. That was something… /u/TheDeech, the guy who was in charge of it, told… our team to do. 227 Because he felt that kind of gets rid of transparency even though we did clearly make a mistake… he thinks we shouldn't be deleting anything at all, and it should all be documented. In cases like this, sometimes multiple posts were seen as a benefit. Live thread readers were known to read the most recent posts and monitor the top of the live thread (since the live thread feature orders posts by newest contribution), rather than browsing through the entire timeline (as would be provided in a comment update). Helping to coordinate people to respond to the November 2015 Paris attacks, the moderator HJonGoldrake explained how the high speed of information moving through a live thread meant that a viewer might miss something, so duplicates were seen as helpful, since they reinforced the information as confirmed from multiple sources while also providing cemented visibility: If there were multiple updates about the same thing it was fine, especially if they were from different source so people could read it from different angles. Especially in a live thread where things are constantly moving in and out of visibility. Multiple updates about the same thing can be beneficial to the viewer, in my view at least, because a lot of people just read what's in front of them like the last five updates, and they might lose something. If it gets reposted, it's better actually. The shift to using live threads instead of comments to coordinate faster updates from multiple contributors also had some benefits. For instance, Anthony explained that the issue of membership turnover throughout the aggregation of the Boston Marathon threads was essentially solved by having multiple people on deck to be able to update at the same time: The benefit that I know that reddit was going for, and I don't think it's as big of a benefit as they might picture it being. A benefit would be, for me, I ran out of steam, I handed the thread off to the next person. They ran out of steam, they handed the thread off to the next person. That's not necessary whenever you have a thread that's like that. You can have 25 people that are assigned to the thread and they can all be posting. That's the benefit. It's a small benefit, and it's a benefit that's not worth the problems that it has. Unlike with posts and comments – as we saw in the case of MH370, where mrgandw and de- facto-idiot had to trade off updating on a shared account (even though that actually helped solve 228 prior issues) – live threads allow participants to freely move in and out and contribute as much as they like. But the differences highlight major issues with coordination: for instance, live thread collaborators tended to participate in larger groups with drastically less explicit communication. Though these collaborations seemed to work out in the end, the quality appeared to deteriorate, judging by the increased number of duplications of information (and then required actions to edit or remove them). While participants expressed relative satisfaction to me in interviews with their coordinated efforts, the end results of larger live threads point to issues – like the need for easier explicit communication channels – that could be solved through design interventions. Further, these larger collaborations illustrate how network gatekeeping practices shift the control of information away from strong decision making toward assumptions of others’ work, meaning that there remains an uncertain shift towards improvisation away from the established coordinative practices of journalists who have institutional experience working in groups during developing events. Moderators Working Together Moderators also have to coordinate with each other – and other users within their subreddits – during developing events. Not only do moderators need to work together to monitor activity and maintain balance within subreddit communities, but they become tasked with also coordinating other users to help participate within these events, particularly when the events are of large interest to the reddit network. They tended to exhibit more explicit coordination communication than non-moderators. Similar to regular users, moderators had impromptu responses to unexpected developing events, but there are some norms and infrastructure in place for everyday forms of coordination that were adapted for information aggregation coordination. 229 Organizing Moderator Tasks While some moderators have been active in particular subreddits longer than others, and while there is a technical hierarchy (where older moderators with privileges can add or remove lower moderators), coordination between moderators tends to be distributed across anyone that is available to participate. Especially in the case of urgent developing events, moderators described how they were drawn back to the platform in case their help was needed. For example, the /r/sandy subreddit produced a number of interesting moderator coordination examples. Andreas was a six-year Swedish veteran of reddit and had previously been a moderator of many subreddits, including /r/AskScience, and he helped facilitate the /r/sandy subreddit during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He explained the basic process of task management among the /r/sandy moderators. In general, he said, some moderators tend to engage in discussions over the moderator mail system, but in the case of an emergent event subreddit like /r/sandy, the process of coordinating moderators was very much an individual process: “I think everybody probably just did kind of what they felt would be most helpful.” He illustrated some of the task allocation: Some people worked on what I was doing, and other people worked on making some mod posts and marked comments (which usually are a little more visible). I know somebody was messing with the CSS, to try to get those to pop up a bit more. But back then, there weren't sticky posts or anything either. We had some CSS tricks to get some stuff up in the header: emergency numbers and that kind of stuff. So, it's just a collective bunch of people doing individual things. He continued to say that, while some discussions had occurred over mod mail – the queue system of reports that sends private messages within reddit’s platform to the moderation team – from his perspective nobody was particularly keen on using that system: “[W]e didn't really bother with it at the time. So maybe there was a lot more organization than I realized?” /r/sandy represented a unique case of moderator coordination, because it was an evolving subreddit changing its content and even rules in response to a disaster, rather than a sustained 230 subreddit for general news with a sustained set of norms. In other words, the temporary nature of /r/sandy meant that moderators were initially less regulated than a larger subreddit with more moderators on hand, but they also had to assemble with more organization because there was a lack of rules and norms in place for that subreddit. Getting More Moderators Involved Because developing events witness surges in submissions and viewers, sometimes moderators have to bring in more people to help with moderation activities. One of the biggest problems is trying to control the population of people that become activated by a controversial event like a shooting. SebayaKeto was a moderator for the /r/SyrianCivilWar subreddit, which reported at length on the long news cycle around that locale and its political turbulence. She had experience watching the small subreddit react to major developments. But in the case of a larger, attention- drawing event like the November 2015 Paris attacks, users who wanted to discuss and comment on the developments surged into a whole host of news subreddits, requiring more hands on deck. And because of the event’s news coverage around the world, more and more people stuck around to talk about the developments. “[B]ecause of the Paris attacks, everyone's become a lot more active in the subreddits. Which means it's getting linked to a lot more, which means there's a flood of new people, and that's when we would bring on a lot of temporary moderators trying to keep the peace. Because you have a lot of people flooding the subreddit that don't really know or respect the rules.” In response to these surges, moderators tried to coordinate with each other to take action. In the /r/Europe subreddit, SpAn12 explained how the moderation team took immediate charge after the November 2015 Paris attacks by identifying tasks that would account for the increased volume of posts and users in the subreddit. However, he then grumbled how the amount of 231 moderators that were available at that specific time were not enough. In response to the urgency, the team reached out for more help, recruiting moderators from other subreddits so they could cover important pieces like language translation tasks: “That's when we got on to our contacts in other subreddits. I mentioned earlier the French subreddit, because we thought not only will they increase our initial capacity, but they would also have a better understanding of the news, and they can access other new sources free from having to wait for translation. They were the first up.” He continued by identifying the need for having sustained monitoring of the subreddit, with enough people to cover for those who wanted to take a break (since the event occurred late into the night, European time): “We then – rather than adding straight capacity – we searched for capacity over the different time zones. We started to pick out those American moderators that we knew we'd dealt with before, and so we spoke to them and said, ‘Can you help us or can you invite your people to help us?’” When adding more people, the amount of coordination amongst moderators did not necessarily increase. When participating in the /r/sandy subreddit, TheWalruss noted how the process of getting added as a moderator was simple, saying to me, “[To get involved], I think I just PM-ed the mod team and I was like, ‘Hey, I can mod effectively. And I'm in the European time zone, so I'll be effective from this time to this time. So if you would like my help, just add me to the team and I'll do what I can.’ And then I got added in.” However, there was no guidance for what to do afterwards, because people were scrambling to stay on top of the increase in activity while also trying to help provide updates: “It wasn't like, ‘Welcome to the team. Here's a shovel. Get working.’ It wasn't like any sort of organization. It was just like… It was very haphazard, short-notice. Everybody was just trying to keep the subreddit afloat, keep it useful. So 232 you know, it's just finding what you can do.” Organization thus relied on a subset of moderators taking the reins, particularly by using pre-established communication channels. External Channels for Coordination One method of coordination that frequently came up was the use of third-party chat spaces like IRC or Slack. Moderators used these spaces similar to regular users, though moderators seemed to use them much more frequently (to be expected, since they used these channels on a day-to- day basis anyway). Moderators generally deal with “modmail,” though another moderator from the /r/Europe subreddit, HJonGoldrake, explained that the modmail system was difficult to use, and the /r/Europe team had to supplement modmail tasks with communication over other chat services. One of his responsibilities in responding to the November 2015 Paris attacks was to help organize moderators: “Chiefly, I did coordination first, and then when I had free time I did moderation work.” His moderator team used Slack (another third-party chat software like IRC) as a backchannel, and he usually went there to coordinate other moderators when he found tasks for them to do: “Often times, if I saw that the mod queue was full, I would just drop into Slack and tell people, ‘We have like 45 items in the mod queue. Somebody get on this,’ if I couldn't do it myself. That helped: a lot of people just stepped in and stopped doing what they were doing otherwise and went to do that. He also explained how Slack tended to be used for short coordination and conversation, but most of the time moderators actively spent on moderation actions (from monitoring reported content from users or the spam filter to deleting submissions that break subreddit rules) rather than trying to organize other participants. Of course, the amount of information that moderators had to pay attention to in these alternate channels depended on the events and timing of developments, but when the activity picked up, moderators definitely relied on these spaces to coordinate fast decisions. HJonGoldrake provided some details into 233 these bursts of activity, saying, “[How many messages were coming in to the Slack channel] depended on what was happening at the time. Most of us were busting ass moderating, so we didn't have time for chatter much. … During the peaks of the events, most of the traffic was short messages about coordination: what was needed, what has happening, who we're talking to, and so on.” Once the developments calmed down, he noted that the team was able to synchronize with each other: “We had lulls in the events: there were several periods around the attacks where no real news was coming in, so we were jumping on Slack and chatting, which is something that we ordinarily do.” However, these external spaces remained secondary to active participation within reddit’s system working on tasks: “Slack didn't see that much traffic during the event itself because we were all busy in reddit trying to keep a lid on the situation.” For subreddits where the moderators had more prior experience working together, the organization mostly took place on previously established infrastructures like third-party chat channels that they would regularly use to moderate their communities. Out of many subreddits, DonTago was a moderator in /r/worldnews, and he told me that spaces like Slack tended to be only used for higher-level conversations and difficult questions that fall into grey areas, when these questionable problems required moderators to come together because it was too difficult for one individual to make an initial call. The ability to have longer discussions made these third- party chat channels particularly valuable: The team we have now is a pretty experienced team, so really only in situations where there are questionable calls or calls that could go either way that we might need sometimes a second opinion on. Those are the times when we engage in the most communication between each other. As far as getting feedback, giving second opinions or bouncing ideas off of each other as far as how something might be handled, pretty routine text book along that line. In the context of developing events, though, these conversational spaces were relied on to a greater degree, especially to help coordinate tasks as people arrived in response. Again, during 234 the late 2015 Paris attacks, HJonGoldrake said that the moderators made a strong effort to delineate tasks as broadly as possible. In comparison to ordinary users, though, moderators took on an exponentially-larger range of tasks, since mods needed to contribute informational updates in addition to maintaining control of their communities. He explained that at the beginning of the event, they needed to figure out what tasks needed attending to: In the beginning, it was hard because there was our team [by] itself, and we were trying especially not to duplicate efforts and to direct efforts to the parts of the situation that needed it the most. We needed people to follow the live thread, so that rumors, fake news, or things like updates [of] the police movements would not be going up. … We needed people to look after submissions, which was kind of a priority but very manageable, so one or two guys could do that. And we needed a lot of people to manage the comments. We divided work along those lines, and since we already knew each other pretty well, it was easy to coordinate that. For the Paris attacks specifically, because the event was so large, and so much interest and attention were driving people to the /r/Europe subreddit, another moderator, SpAn12, explained that the first tasks handed out were meant to focus on informational updates, so that there were enough personnel to support the needs of the core subreddit community (as well as eventual others who found the subreddit as the live thread became more and more popular). He explained how the perceived size of the event triggered people to check in with the moderation team: “[I]nformation was pouring in thick and fast… All the other moderators sort of appeared. They'll see the story, and they'll think something is going to happen on Reddit: ‘I should probably go and help out because I will be doing something with the volume.’” He explained, though, that as the number of developments grew larger, it was clear they needed to figure out how to get more people in response: “Obviously I think with seven or eight of us to begin with, that is not enough – when you're all based in Europe – to sustain a live thread (which is blind to international time zones) on a situation that is developing and which is quite clear that will have updates throughout the night.” 235 It is important to note that while moderators have a set of daily routines to deal with participation in their subreddits, developing events introduced complications that they needed to react to in improvised ways, just as regular users did. To illustrate this point, SlyRatchet, a moderator across a few other European subreddits, described the lack of organization around creating a live thread to respond to the Paris attacks as centered in the inability to plan for such an event. Improvisation was necessary: “How did the live thread start? We didn't do any pre- planning at all, obviously. We didn't have any sort of mechanism in place to decide when we should do live threads or how we should do them. We basically made all of this up on the spot.” But coordination was relatively quick anyway, due in part to the moderators’ pre-existing conversational channels: Basically all good moderation teams have some sort of instant messaging back channel. We use Slack, for instance. … I was chit-chatting with the other mods… Then, [another moderator] said, “By the way, guys. Something big is happening in Paris. There's a link. We're looking into this.” We were discussing that for a little while. … Then, as we were sort of realizing how big this was getting, and that it was sort of surpassing Charlie Hebdo, being comparable to [other bombings] ... We realized ... I can't remember who said it, but one of us said, “Guys, should we start a live thread?” It was just: yes. Then, it was just like, “Okay, let's get on that.” Everything kicked off from there. The difficulty of moderating a news-related subreddit partly revolved around coordinating a team that was able to respond immediately to events that could happen all around the world: a concern for the /r/worldnews subreddit. One of the moderators there, DonTago, explained how – with a team distributed across many time zones – they usually depend on day-to-day organization and infrastructure to coordinate and be able to hold prolonged discussions for more difficult decisions: “It is very staggered in a way that we all come on. When I wake up in the morning and I am moderating, I am catching the tail end of the people that we have in India and Australia moderating. … I am so bad with thinking about the time zones. But you know, we all overlap in subtle ways for the most parts in the evenings and in the mornings.” A distributed team allowed 236 them to have conversations that overlapped time zones, bringing moderators dispersed all over the world together in a shared space for coordination purposes for issues that needed longer discussion: I feel we all pretty well coordinate, and in instances where there needs to be a deeper discussion of a longer length, that's where we have the backroom threads where we can have more of a longer protracted conversation in greater detail over the course of several days or something like that. That is what the back room threads are used for, rather than the mod mail, which is more for really quick instantaneous discussion. A similar issue was coordinating responses to emergent issues. For example, SpAn12 realized that the team needed more people with local expertise to respond to the earliest stages of the Paris attacks. Moderators’ pre-established connections helped fill in these gaps easily. He told me he easily reached out to the /r/France moderators to ask for help: “That's when we got on to our contacts in other subreddits. I mentioned earlier the French subreddit, because we thought not only will they increase our initial capacity but they would also have a better understanding of the news and they can access other new sources free from having to wait for translation.” One French moderator they introduced stepped in and was able to provide crucial information because of his experience and local knowledge: “[A] French moderator, a native Frenchman, who moderates for us was by and above way better than us at accessing the information… A few [of us], at least of the moderators who were posting, decided it's probably best that this guy posts: [he] can access news sources from three different languages, [he] can watch the news in the native French, he can hear what they are saying.” Coordinating Non-Moderator Volunteers For moderators, coordination of non-moderator participants during developing events proved to be a difficult task. Inclusion of non-moderators allowed these teams to cover more ground in completing necessary tasks during developing events, but it also could introduce difficulties 237 around matching values and working with varying levels of experience, highlighted by differences in roles and repeated exposure to each other. Also, moderators frequently enter into conflicts with regular users because of differences in privileges and control (see Chapter 7 for particular details). HJonGoldrake walked me through his attempt to reach out to non-moderators to include them in aggregation tasks. In general, he gave the impression that coordinating was relatively easier between members of the moderation team but more difficult when working with other people that were newly added. He explained how his team of moderators added participants to the moderator chat backchannels: “In terms of moderators, I think at the end of it, it was 50/50 [versus users in the Slack channel].” He also mentioned providing temporary moderation privileges to a lot of other people, given the urgency of the Paris attacks: Ten or twelve people in the Slack, and ten or twelve other moderators outside of it, were added temporarily for the live thread or temporarily to the subreddit. Then we had… say thirty contributors in total [for the live thread]. Twelve of those contributors in the live thread had moderating permissions. The others had all the update permissions (so fewer people than I thought actually), but it worked pretty well. Given the short amount of time to organize a team of dependable people, it was hard work to confirm that these participants would be able to do a good job while also managing the various other required tasks in the moment. He told me that, for each new individual they considered, the team judged their profiles: “The thing that we had to do (which was something that I and a couple of other guys took charge of) was whenever someone was either sent over to us to help or volunteered, we would quickly go through their post history to make sure that we could trust them.” He said that they were looking for people who would not post politically charged commentary; however, they only looked briefly given the high-tempo nature of the event: “We kind of vetted people for 30 seconds, 1 minute at most.” Even though they attempted to get 238 people on the same page with other moderators about what kind of information was valid to post, they encountered issues. He said, “We had a bit of a problem of people just reporting rumors or submitting information from sourcing that were either sensationalistic or not reliable. … [They] kept posting anything and everything, and we just asked people not to post it again because it was completely garbage.” Moderators had to make gatekeeping decisions, like who to include, quickly. The high- tempo reactions, though, highlight how the relationships between moderators and other users were shaped by impromptu choices and improvised discussions amongst moderators. SlyRatchet explained that identifying gaps in what needed to be done remained a critical skill, because the moderators needed to take initiative to see tasks accomplished, especially when new members who don’t have repeated experience with these kind of events were thrown into the mix. While moderators could work together to make these decisions, it became common for individuals to make judgments: “You can't really assign tasks to anybody, obviously, because we're all volunteers. It's basically just all you can really do is bring something up as an issue and say, ‘OK. This is getting neglected. Can somebody do this?’” He asserted, “Usually, if you want something to get done, you have to take the lead yourself, and then other people and other mods will follow a little bit. … Broadly speaking, it tends to be more that we'll all agree on those things that you can't do. Then, if you do do things, they have to be done a certain way.” The rapid (and chaotic) environment of a live thread may have been better for moderators for monitoring participant contributions compared to the older style of comment or post updates, because they did not have to rely on one individual who was updating a post or comment. Instead, they could test out multiple contributors and add or subtract the best. HJonGoldrake 239 argued that the increased capacity of participants and new monitoring features seemed to also increase the quality and speed of aggregation when aggregation in live threads: In terms of the switch from comments to live threads, I think it was a giant leap in quality and speed because – instead of relying on one person who had the big comment at the top of the thread and was personally and solely responsible for updates – we had thirty people that could do that. Which, of course, changes everything by literally an order of magnitude. Plus, we had the possibility for moderators to control what was being updated in terms of quality and excluding some things that shouldn't go in updates (like… police movements). It added to both the volume, the speed, and the quality of the live reporting. Limiting the Amount of People Similar to non-moderators earlier in this chapter, moderators also considered limiting the number of people involved. BlatantConservative talked me through how the urgency and lack of strong coordination across reddit’s various communities during the November 2015 Paris attacks led to a fracture of coverage that eventually had to be recombined. He argued that by limiting the number of people, it allowed for more precise coordination. However, in the case of Paris, four simultaneous live threads were updated, led by moderators and active participants of different subreddits: I try to keep my threads down to like less than 10 people posting at the same time, because if there's a lot of people posting it just gets really confusing. But because somebody else had started [a live thread] in the Europe subreddit, there were a good twenty or thirty people all posting at the same time. … So, Paris was a big enough event that there were actually four live threads that got started. It therefore required additional effort to converge these multiple groups of people toward a common goal, centering the focus on one live thread: “A lot of them kind of migrated over and joined the Europe thread. So, everybody's working together and trying to simplify it and bring everything to a central location.” The reaction to the Paris attacks, though, was exceptional: unlike with prior events, where moderators would organize themselves and some other community members to react and help 240 with live threads, moderators from /r/Europe contacted reddit administrators to ask for more help, since they wanted to reach a higher capacity of people updating, given their lack of resources to respond to the event. While this support from the admins likely helped the convergence of the live threads mentioned above, it also resulted in dozens of people being added to the primary live thread, resulting in some disorganization later, as new members tried to figure out what to do without much guidance. I use this case of converging to one live thread to talk more about the politics of control and design in Chapter 7. Conclusion In this chapter, I illustrated how collaboration and coordination play out amongst multiple participants – both users and moderators – when working on peer information aggregation together. In response to developing events, urgency and uncertainty can lead to improvisation when it comes to coordinating multiple people, especially when multiple people who are not acquainted with each other or have no experience doing this kind of work are brought together. Explicit coordination tended to be more frequent between two or three people who worked together for a while or between moderators who had previously worked together on a team (and were able to use the same communication infrastructure). Live threads, though, posed problems. The high degree of implicit coordination – namely without leaders or editors – meant that the tasks of aggregation were possibly more chaotic and unorganized than necessary. Interestingly, participants mentioned both positive and negative feelings regarding the quality and results of these collaborations. Moderators, in a positive light, expressed that live threads allowed them to be able to contribute to quality control, as well as made the process of coordinating participants easier (than when using comments and posts, editable by only one person). However, in one case, a contributor felt that – based on their own experience 241 participating in the live threads – given issues around the posting of rumors, it seemed that the live thread required more moderation than was provided: I think nobody corrected [the rumor]. I think that the person who started the live thread, she also contributed the most content, but I really don't know if she took down anything. I don't think so, because like the rumor… was reposted about four times. … I think it was pretty okay in general, because there weren't a whole lot of updates, and so everyone who was working on this thread could easily see what should be reposted and what shouldn't. … [T]here was no leader or no moderation going on, which is a big disappointment to say the least. This chapter illuminates how relationships between participants played out when aggregating information about developing breaking news events. In some cases, participants formed strong relationships to work on these tasks, while in other cases, these relationships were fleeting and revolved much more around watching what other people did rather than negotiating what to do. These fluctuating relationships have significant implications for our understanding of network gatekeeping. First, who gets to participate seems relatively arbitrary. While some vetting occurred, it did not always happen, and therefore aggregation relied on the shaky expectation that multiple people would work themselves out toward a positive result. Second, because most participants did not have a formal form of organization (such as that of journalists within media organizations), more strong-handed control of information played out in cases where secure relationships (like those between moderators) were formed in the short period of time during the developing event. In cases of collaborations around peer aggregation on reddit, gatekeeping practices seemed to fluctuate depending on prior experience and organization. The frequent lack of coordinating communication between co-aggregators, for instance, suggests that successful peer production models like those from Wikipedia might not translate well to the impromptu, temporary information practices that emerge when people react to developing events. Instead, the 242 high-tempo nature of developing events results in too much implicit coordination for constant, high-quality contributions, particularly when explicit communication channels do not necessarily exist (in addition to the lack of standardized norms for collecting and vetting information that I illustrated in the previous chapter). Therefore, collaboration in peer information aggregation suggests that network gatekeeping might needs to consider how the particular types of decisions and relationships (especially weak ones) in peer production settings play into what kinds of information control can and will occur. Currently, network gatekeeping points more toward general claims about roles and information flows than the finer details behind how those roles and flows interact in an evolving context like a network. The evidence presented about collaborations and the relative lack of explicit coordination between peer information aggregation participants suggests that contemporary gatekeeping theory needs to closely examine these momentary interactions to see how information gets caught up in the twists and turns of interpersonal communication rather than assuming it works as a homogenous and straightforward “flow” of information. While these collaborations focused mainly on information production, in the next chapter, I examine more closely the role that the design of the platform plays in information circulation and access. Because gatekeeping also deals with the availability of information, design can impact the interactions between different users in ways that can crucially impact the dynamics of network gatekeeping beyond the individual decision-making agency of participants. 243 Ch. 7: Roles and Designs: Platform Gatekeeping & Visibility This final analysis chapter aims to answer the question, “What conflicts arise between human and technological actors through platform design and governance in peer information aggregation?” In particular, I use concerns about visibility as a lens through which to view these conflicts, because visibility remains a crucial facet of the success of information in response to developing events while also highlighting the importance of power between actors within the design of sociotechnical systems. In this chapter, I explore political power as the fourth dimension of network gatekeeping in the context of peer information aggregation on reddit. Political power broadly refers to control over the global political landscape and the transformation of this control through technology (Castells, 1996), but here I use it to describe the “everyday politics” that people encounter in and across social media platforms (Highfield, 2016). Politics is “not just formal, as shaped and discussed by established political actors and the mainstream media, but highly informal” and “features occasional contributions by individuals who are loosely connected (if at all), but who have their own personal interests, perspectives and issues of importance” (7). Citing Lukes (2005), Barzilai-Nahon (2008) argues that for online social systems – unlike individuals’ decisions – “the bias of the system can be mobilized, recreated and reinforced in ways that are neither consciously chosen nor the intended result of particular individuals’ choices” (1500). Technology and news are imbued with values and politics (Dourish, 2006; Friedman & Nissenbaum, 1996), and the very personal work of volunteers who do aggregation affect the practices of network gatekeeping in these situations. Therefore, it is important to recognize that technology infrastructures and social roles on reddit enact control structures that affect the distributed and decentralized behaviors of information sharing. In the case of aggregation, the 244 power of gatekeepers and gated especially conflict, because while in prior chapters I recognized the fluidity of these roles, the design of systems (which acts like a gatekeeper) may not be subject to the agency of gated participants, since typically they cannot change it. Design plays an important role in how contributors to online communities participate in these systems. In any social platform, particularly user-generated content sites, the design of the system mediates how people use it and interact with others (Lessig, 1999). The design of a platform affords or limits certain actions that an individual can take, and it influences the norms that develop around how people behave, how they react, and what they expect from the larger network of contributors and audiences. The code, design, and affordances of a technology platform become particularly important for the visibility of information as these systems grow larger. Because people may not seek information out, the design of a system can aid in locating information (Treem & Leonardi, 2012, 150). For instance, algorithms that recommend, rank, or filter information (Beam, 2014; Meraz, 2012) can provide better visibility of particular types of information at scale, when thousands or millions of participants contribute information on a daily basis. Further, design might allow large communities to act collectively in similar ways as computational filters of information by calling attention to or rejecting information in real-time gatekeeping roles (e.g., through retweeting as an automatic feature of Twitter’s platform; Veenstra et al., 2014). Online governance also plays an important role in these systems. Social roles defined by design shape what behaviors are allowed and forbidden, thereby influencing information circulation and gatekeeping. Moderators in particular help to organize and reinforce the goals and behaviors of online communities (Kim, 2000; Kraut & Resnick, 2012), and potential participants are more attracted to moderated online communities (Wise, Hamman, & Thorson, 245 2006). While moderation generally focuses on “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse” (Grimmelmann, 2015), moderators also play important gatekeeping roles, structuring the visibility of information given the constraints of any particular system. Moderation teams work together to appropriately address the issues of a given community, but occasionally decisions will be readdressed and overturned (Lampe & Resnick, 2004). Moderators may also overlook information that does not achieve high visibility or receive strong community feedback (Lampe & Resnick, 2004). Administrators (or webmasters) play similar roles as moderators, but they have final decision over the system’s design and rules. They may also take it upon themselves to monitor behavior, track metrics, and improve the system over time. However, with today’s scale of sociotechnical systems, the responsibilities of any one administrator exceeds the amount that person can accomplish, so administration teams tend to run these scalable websites, groups which then have to decide on shared values for organizing and operating the platform (Van der Walt & Van Brakel, 2000). Overall, visibility is an important part of gatekeeping in new media contexts. Technical design – whether it is the code that puts some information above others or the social roles built into a system where some people can remove information but others cannot – provides affordances for gatekeeping practices. Gatekeepers may use the affordances of design to impact the gated to a stronger degree, for example through absolute control over information circulation through deletion privileges. On reddit in particular, the visual display of information shapes and influences many interactions between users and content on the platform, and therefore the main designed mechanisms of power –ranking and user roles – exert control over visibility. Therefore, visibility is an appropriate lens to understand political power within an ecosystem like reddit, 246 because it highlights how concerns over gatekeeping practices tie strongly into aggregation practices. In the last chapters, I showed the individual and collaborative information production processes around the promotion of particular aspects of peer information aggregation. This chapter extends that work into the realm of conflicts around information aggregation to understand control and power: I illustrate the conflicts and concerns brought about by the design of the platform, from its technical infrastructure to the social behaviors and responsibilities that emerge from its technically-defined user roles. Concerns particularly around attention and visibility permeated the narratives of contributors when participants reacted to mediation by voting and algorithms, or decision making by powerful moderators and administrators (who have the privilege to delete or promote content at will). The expectations of peer information contributors related in many instances with their personal power within the system: those who did not understand how the system worked or who did not have moderator privileges remained at a disadvantage. The bits of friction that participants encountered illustrate how gatekeeping processes continue to change in network settings in reaction to environmental and social situations where gatekeepers and gated interact directly around the control of information (instead of these processes being removed from gated audiences’ control). Visibility and Attention in Sociotechnical Systems As users in social media platforms increasingly create immense amounts of information year after year, attention also increasingly becomes a commodity, as people vie for stardom, popularity, and accumulated metrics (Goldhaber, 1997). Breaking news situations provide a sense of urgency for new information, and therefore visibility is a key concern to peer information aggregation participants, because they want people to see their contributions. 247 Reddit’s platform affords methods to produce visibility for some information over others, and that visibility is negotiated through crowd contributions (voting), the design of algorithms (ranking), and the decisions of privileged participants (moderators and administrators). Contributors to peer information aggregation generally recognized the importance of visibility in their work and across participation on reddit more broadly. For instance, as JP claimed when reflecting on reddit’s role in the movement of information, within reddit’s particular system, the power of what the crowd thinks (the “hivemind,” a term that many redditors use to describe the groupthink of the collective network) mostly affects what gets seen: “Basically the way Reddit works is all about visibility… Usually anything that has the hivemind’s backing, so to speak, gets upvoted to the front page.” In the following sections, I focus on two main themes derived from interviews and observation related to the factors that shape visibility on reddit. First, I look at how conflicts around visibility emerged from the intersection of voting and ranking algorithms that are the foundational aggregation mechanic across reddit’s system. In particular, I examine concerns around the algorithm not surfacing contributions for particular reasons, such as votes gained, as well as changes in the algorithms designed by administrators. Second, I explore the importance that governance – through the roles of moderators and administrators – has in deleting or promoting content with the privileges granted by the engineered design of the platform (or merely the privilege of being an employee of reddit’s company). Algorithmic Filtering through Voting and Ranking The core mechanisms that underlie reddit’s platform are crowd voting and ranking algorithms. Because a majority of audience members use the default settings of the platform, the ranking algorithms that promote highly-voted content over others affect which pieces of information get 248 seen over others to the greatest degree. Therefore, gaining votes on contributions is a particular concern for reddit users, particularly those who are doing peer information aggregation work. Because these participants see the information that they are aggregating during developing events as crucial and important for reddit’s massive, networked audience, they did not want their efforts purposefully hidden (from receiving downvotes) or unintentionally lost (due to a lack of upvotes). Participants told me that, in the early days of reddit, during a national or global crisis, posts contributed to the front page would overwhelm many subreddits. In recent years, the increased participation of thousands more users in addition to better moderation (e.g., removing posts unrelated to any given subreddit, or trying to position relevant information together to provide balance with other content in a particular subreddit) meant that stories about developing events did not entirely dominate the highest ranks (the first three to five slots) on front pages across the platform’s subreddit communities. However, people would continue to submit many posts as soon as a developing event gains coverage in mainstream media or social media (e.g., see Figure 7 in Chapter 5 illustrating the many duplicates in reaction to the November 2015 Paris attacks), and it is up to the community and moderators to favor some (and aim for one) over the others. Voting Voting comprises the foundational functional component of aggregation and ranking on reddit. As one participant concisely described earlier in this dissertation, reddit operates on the basis that “there's thousands and thousands of people participating and just an algorithm to see what is important and what not.” While “participating” here was generalized to any activity, without taking into account the values, biases, and homophily of individuals and groups doing the voting, 249 redditors could have difficulty perceiving these aspects of participation on the site, whereas they interact with submissions’ scores and derive meaning from them in every single subreddit. Participants depended strongly on upvotes. Many claimed that the primary reason for this dependency was visibility: the ranking algorithm determined what content could be seen by the most people. This reason may seem obvious, but the resulting consequence was that, without upvotes, contributions would not gain attention from as many people as possible in a very competitive space. As one interviewee plainly described, “Based on the way reddit categorizes posts, if this didn't receive any upvotes, then it wouldn't have been seen.” While there are many factors that contribute to visibility – like the amount of interest in a particular event, or the amount of people who decide to search for content – participants always assumed that reddit’s ranking algorithms shaped audience readership. From the Netherlands, harrymuesli summarized this expectation, which he had recognized in only two years of participating on the site, in more detail: The nice thing about reddit is it keeps news that is important or that is still pretty much news – not old news – it keeps it kind of high in the pages. Page one: that is either news that is new and very quickly rising because it's important, thanks to the upvote/downvote system, or it's news that you might have read before but somehow is still continuing or still relevant (and then it stays on a bit longer). It's based on how much people still actively give votes and participate in discussions. For people contributing to peer aggregated information during developing events, votes tended to demarcate attention from their audiences. Thinking about his participation in collecting information about the revolution in Turkey in 2013, one interviewee explained, “I remember it being on the top front page for quite a while, on the top strip. That's how I knew people were seeing it, as well as the number of upvotes were constantly changing.” Importantly, content that becomes highly upvoted enters an exponential cycle of attention gain (the “rich get richer” phenomenon; Newman, 2005), because as many more people 250 see increasingly-upvoted posts, they upvote and comment on those same contributions, pushing them into further visibility. From another perspective, if a user goes to their default front page, the submissions they see are already the most-upvoted ones; to vote on others, they need to click around and explore more areas of the platform. For instance, when thinking about the massive audiences that appeared after the Boston Marathon bombings, JP explained that, by getting many upvotes, more came in, adding an additional boost that pushed his post’s visibility platform- wide: Once you get voted up high enough where you can be within the first couple pages of that front page, more people start seeing your stuff. Eventually, your stuff – even if you're not subscribed to a subreddit – can rise to the top of people's front pages. Visibility's a big part, but it also started this snowball effect, where at first it was prevalent in that one comment, and then when I made the first thread, it got to the top of /r/news. Then, so many people were looking at it in /r/news, because it's a very popular subreddit, that people who weren't subscribed to /r/news were seeing it as well. Kash_if had contributed to an aggregated comment about the capture of former Prime Minister Gaffadi in Libya, and he explained how this cycle impacted his perception of his work’s value. At first, it took him a while to realized he was getting attention: “[B]ecause I was like early on into the thread, I posted a comment that started getting some upvotes initially. …Then people started commenting under my comment, and I realized that I had started receiving upvotes.” As time went on, and more people became interested in the story, he realized that getting more upvotes resulted in even more down the road: “I think it was kind of like a vicious circle, because now I was updating it, it was getting more upvoted, and because I was upvoted, I wanted to kind of provide people with whatever information that I could.” Importantly, though, the size of particular communities tended to influence the amount of competition needed to achieve visibility. A small amount of votes might have pushed a submission to the top of a smaller subreddit, compared to a larger community where hundreds or 251 thousands of posts per day compete for the attention of a small initial subset of voters. One contributor who participated in /r/avaiation (a medium-sized subreddit, with approximately 68,000 people at the time of writing) told me that the replies he received to his updated comment were visible to most readers, because they were not drowned out by so many others (particularly compared to massive subreddits that have over ten million subscribers). For him, smaller subreddits were easier to gain attention in: “People were posting information as replies to my comment, and those were visible anyway, so it wasn't like people were sending it to me and I was adding it. People were adding it. The thing is, this works in the /r/aviation subreddit just because it's not a huge one. When people post these things, they remain fairly visible, especially they get upvoted… you get up to 10-20 points, they would be visible.” However, in larger subreddits, it became more difficult: “Somewhere like /r/worldnews, that wouldn't happen, just because there would be hundreds – maybe even thousands – of comment replies to such comments. It would be a different format for somewhere like /r/worldnews or /r/news, versus in a smaller subreddit like /r/aviation.” In some cases, especially in the larger subreddits, posts needed to gain traction in order to reach a high enough position to become visible. Many factors affect this initial surge of support, such as timing or people searching through the “new” queue to vote on recent submissions. For instance, when shankee became involved in aggregating information about a fire in a Bucharest nightclub, his submission did not take off particularly well at first, because it was a developing event in a country that not many redditors were from that had occurred at an odd time of the day when enough people might not have been watching the subreddit for breaking news. He explained, “That international aspect of it was probably the reason that it took so long to get to the front page. … I think that's an important aspect of it. It takes time for things to get upvoted, 252 and once it gets upvoted quite a lot, you'll see that rapidly it gets more attention very quickly.” The long crawl from a post being submitted to getting a large enough base of support remained frustrating: “It just takes that time for a post to get really up there, to get recognized enough. In that aspect, that's the negative part of it, it's just that it takes time for the initial story to get out.” Voting as Filtering for Ranking In Chapter 5, I pointed out participants’ perceptions of how the crowd relied on feedback as a means for vetting information. I want to return to this point to illustrate in more depth how contributors depend on the crowd to upvote or downvote informational content. Generally, people perceive voting on reddit as a filtering mechanism for good and bad content (using upvotes and downvotes, respectively). As one contributor explained, “I guess some of [my trust in reddit] also is the fact that because of the upvotes, that will filter out in a proper way the content. You assume that the upvotes are going to do their job.” Even moderators explained that in certain circumstances, they paid attention less to content and more on other tasks, because they felt they could rely on the crowd to downvote irrelevant content. Emily, who volunteered in the /r/sandy subreddit, explained that the moderation team was able to depend on voting to monitor most of the posts, as the team spent time on taking care of other tasks (such as monitoring discussions for bad behavior): “I think that we kept the moderation of discussions down to a bare minimum, because the voting really did handle that.” Importantly, though, people directly connected this crowd filtering mechanism to visibility driven by the platform’s design. In other words, downvoted information resulted in submissions being hidden, and participants took for granted that anything hidden was not important or worthy of their time. EpicBadass made this claim when discussing his experience covering a school shooting in Washington State: “Generally, the stuff that's hidden, it's stuff you 253 don't need to see. Yeah, I'd say it's pretty important on the subreddit, because even the news stories – you know, how this [post] made it to the top – it's because some people are interested in seeing that post, so it's going to get an upvote.” In other words, people relied on and expected information – especially things that might be construed in any way as “breaking news” – to reach the top of any particular subreddit, because those interested would upvote a lot (and would upvote at all, rather than just reading the headline or comments and skipping the voting). However, some people complained that in particular subreddits there could be lower quality content that would rise to the top via crowd voting. Frequently, participants referred to this kind of voting process as the “hivemind” effect. Usually, references to the “hivemind” focused on the ability for collective action to achieve interesting results. But in some cases, participants also inflected “hivemind” with a negative tone, for instance suggesting that when the reddit community gives preferential treatment to certain kinds of topics, those links and text posts that are upvoted are not always “high quality.” The hivemind effect on voting concerned a fair number of people, especially when it was positioned alongside critical event-related information. If the crowd was voting on content that could potentially take crucial space and visibility away from information coming out of a developing event, then contributors would identify that as problematic. The biggest issue about developing events revolved around the fact that, in any crisis, dozens of people would contribute individual posts about the event, resulting in more posts that voters needed to look through and decide to vote on. If people were not searching through all of these posts and then voting on them, then related information – especially any new updates that were just emerging from the event – would not rise high enough to be seen (a conclusion that other scholars have also identified in empirical research; see Gilbert, 2013). During the Boston 254 Marathon, for instance, much information was circulating, but not enough people seemed to be voting on the new information to surface it for others. One of the contributors, Anthony, complained how the lack of voters led to problems, where not enough people stepped up to look through all of the incoming submissions: “[I]t's really hard for people to properly go through and upvote/downvote everything, especially if too many people are spending too much time commenting rather than reading. … I think that's where the upvote/downvote, mechanic fails, is whenever the number of people participating and reading shrinks compared to the number of people reporting.” Timing and Ranking Participants also explained that upvotes – and therefore visibility produced by voting – depended on timing. Earlier in Chapter 4, I noted that potential contributors considered proper timing as a motivator to step up to volunteer. For timing in relation to visibility, participants were concerned with how long any post they contributed to might be sustained, based on the time at which it was initially posted. In other words, visibility seemed to strongly correlate with how quickly any particular post was contributed when compared to all the others. For instance, people mentioned that the “first” article that was posted about a particular event would often be the one that made it to the top of the subreddit. For SlyRatchet, timing became particularly important during the November 2015 Paris attacks, and he noted that one of the first posts ended up getting humongous support, particularly since it was such a charged event: [T]he first bit of news, the first article that gets published, about a major event especially, that is going straight to the top of the subreddit. I think the initial BBC article about the Paris attacks, I think that ended up with five figures of upvotes. Normally, we only get 1,000 or 2,000. They were upvoted quite a lot. Then, nothing else really managed to get to that level. 255 Participants again and again noted other factors that came into play related to timing. For example, traction over time was an especially important facet of how successful a post might be. Even though initial timing was important, people noted that the timing of a post in relation to others – in particular to have people vote on it over a sustained period of time – was crucial. Kash_if explained how the initial traction of votes on his post about Gaddafi helped bring it to visibility, again taking advantage of the cyclical nature of visibility to get even more votes later: I think one of the reasons why I kept [updating], as I mentioned earlier also, was because I was early into the thread. When I commented, my initial comment got a bit of traction. … [B]ecause I had that traction, a lot of people commented or replied to my comment, and I saw that I was getting karma. I thought, let me just add some more information. … I mean it is because I was in the thread early, got some upvotes, my comment was the top comment in the thread so everybody entering the thread was looking at my comment first. The particular amount of time that it took for a post to gain visibility was also a concern for contributors. For instance, shankee considered his participation across a dozen different events and explained how new information might take a while to bubble up after it was posted, because so many people needed to keep on voting it compared to all the other upvoted submissions: “[I]t just takes a lot of time for it to be recognized. … [Y]ou don't really get new posts in the thread themselves that quickly get to the top. And upvoting still always takes a lot of time even in a thread itself, because it just has thousands of comments already. For a new one to get there with great information, it’s very hard to, and especially quickly, get to the top.” The delay from posting to visibility could be frustrating. Shankee went on to detail how a post might get popular quickly but only after a certain point. Up to that point, he explained, the upward climb was slow. He said, “It takes time for things to get upvoted, and once it gets upvoted quite a lot, you'll see that rapidly it gets more attention very quickly. It just takes that 256 time for a post to get really up there, to get recognized enough. In that aspect, that's the negative part of it, it's just that it takes time for the initial story to get out.” Over time, it was also possible for certain posts, and especially comments, to undergo variations in voting patterns. For example, during my observations of multiple threads throughout the course of the aftermath of the late 2015 Paris attacks, Moussa, who had posted updates in a comment, had his submission sit at one of the highest positions in the thread for hours. However, as the developments continued, and more and more people – especially eyewitnesses – came to reddit to report additional information, other comments began to overtake his own (months later, his now sits in the 11 th highest position). This dynamic related to the varying types of attention that voters could have during an event: here, people were initially concerned about aggregated informative updates, but eventually, they were intrigued by personal accounts from people who had witnessed the events firsthand (a phenomenon recognized as “affective news,” where personal reactions mix with information content; Papacharissi, 2015; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). For instance, when I asked about his post shifting to a lower position, Moussa told me it was expected based on people’s needs in the moment, where people didn’t need his informational updates but wanted to know more about people’s personal struggles: I think the comments at the very top are more like, human… [B]asically, most of them were related to people who were actually there. Like somebody commented saying, “Hey, I was there.” There's more human nature to them than the top comments. Like cheering people up or if somebody knew somebody who's been there before. It was the more emotional comments that were at top. And at a point to go knew what was happening, so there was no more need for updates. Sometimes participants even complained about timing as a major factor built in to reddit’s platform. Even though reddit’s algorithms are open-source, it is nearly impossible to predict how well a post will do based on the number of simultaneous submissions, the amount of people 257 voting, and other evolving factors. There remains a pervasive sense, though, that the algorithms are biased towards certain times. MaximaxII, who had contributed to aggregation for the November 2015 Paris attacks, complained, “You don't see the new comments, you only see the people who were there first and who got instantly upvoted. That's the sort of thing that I sort of dislike about Reddit, in a sense. You can have great content, but if it's not there first, you won't see it.” To him, you had to be first, or you would lose the ability to provide information to people: “It's only the first few comments that will ever make it to the top. If you're not in the first 10% to comment, then people won't see it.” Some community members have looked at reddit’s data to find trends in posting times, 77 finding that posting at different points in the day does increase the likelihood of a post receiving a high score. But while it appears that there are better times to submit content to specific subreddits, it is impossible to know when any unexpected event might occur and when contributors will have to worry about competing with already-upvoted content when the timing of a developing event is not conducive to receiving upvotes quickly enough to surpass other posts. Threats to Good Ranking: The Character Cap Other aspects of reddit’s platform limit the ways in which participants could can take advantage of good timing and subsequent ranking. For instance, one concern is whether or not the attention given to a particular post will continue if the updates need to be moved to another comment or post. Sometimes contributors will run out of room, resulting in the necessary creation of new submission pages. These spatial shifts between pages are surprisingly common. 77 https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3nkwwa/the_best_time_to_post_to_reddit_east_coast_early/ 258 For years, contributors primarily provided news updates through textual “self” posts and comments. However, reddit’s system was never intended for long, continual updates, so participants frequently referred to one of the biggest limitations of reddit’s system as the text character limit. Each post and comment restricts the total amount of textual characters – up to 10,000 total – that a user can add, resulting in confusion, delays, and additional work for those participating in breaking news information aggregation. As one interviewee explained, “[I]f you have a post on Reddit – usually people don't hit it, but if you hit it, if you string out a thing long enough – it will have a character limit. So you have to start a second post. … I linked it to the first post – I knew people were looking at it – so I just said, ‘All right, I made a second post,’ and then I just link that second comment to the first.” The reddit live format was introduced for a variety of reasons, though one of the important contributions it made for breaking news information aggregation was addressing the limitations of the limited character count. A former administrator told me that the engineering team eventually addressed the character limitation after users started to find “creative workarounds.” For participants that encountered a limit, it provided an annoying limitation that interrupted their workflow. For one participant who aggregated information related to the political uprisings in Turkey, he recounted, “I remember editing my post in the morning and trying to figure out where I can make it shorter, because as I hit the character cap, it just stopped me from writing, though I had to edit it again and again and again to make sure I could post. That also messed with the timing as well because… I remember having that for half an hour before I could post [a specific piece of information].” In some cases, this limitation did not phase the contributors, though it did force them to create and monitor additional posts. When thinking back to his participation collecting 259 information about MH370, mrgandw said that in the many number of posts that he and de-facto- idiot created, they encountered the limitation frequently. “[W]e would go over that character limit after a certain amount, so that's when we would start a new part, basically.” For them, though, it wasn’t particularly an issue: “What was cool is that there was a time as the news kind of slowed down where we would actually run out of news at the same time that the updates coverage ended, so each part started to become one different day of coverage. … It was just a limitation of Reddit's space and everything, their space constraints.” When administrators were considering building the reddit live feature, they asked some aggregation participants about their experiences. JP helped explained what issues he had encountered during updating throughout the Boston Marathon bombing incident. He explained to me that the character limit was one of the worst: “Definitely the space limitation. When all was said and done [I created] eight update threads. … Definitely the size was a limitation. Just being able to make a post and say, ‘That was that post for this time,’ or whatever and then the site being like, ‘You ran out of character. You can't do that.’” For him, it was annoying to have to shift everyone to a new thread or comment and try to gain attention again: “Then you have to direct everybody to the new thread because you're like, ‘There's nothing I could do about it.’ Some people were mad at that, too. They were like, ‘Just stay in one thread. Why do you got to keep making them?’” Even though he complained, the attention around the event might have spurred additional action toward his contributions, avoiding any issue. He continued, “I specifically remember I made a [new] thread, and I put one update in it, and I refreshed the page. The thread was not even live for three minutes, and it had over 10,000 upvotes. … At the end of the previous thread I just put, ‘Here's a link to the new thread.’ The moment I did that, everybody just migrated with [me].” 260 Ironically, while reddit eventually launched the live feature in 2014 after speaking with peer information aggregation volunteers, it took until June 2015 for reddit engineers to eventually change the character limit to a higher number. 78 When Votes Don’t Matter Occasionally, participants explained that gaining upvotes on their contributions did not necessarily matter. Two reasons emerged from the interviews: not minding about upvotes because 1) the information would be readily available as a documented resource for future visitors, and 2) they were participating in a smaller subreddit where the differentiation in the number of upvotes per post was not as large as the default subreddits. While upvotes might be crucial to producing visibility for people’s updates, some participants expressed minimal concern about certain updates, as long as they were able to make the information available. Participants seemed to care about the most recent updates as they were contributing, but for older content that wasn’t as relevant in the moment, it was simply important to keep it available in some form within reddit’s system. For example, kash_if – who aggregated information after former Prime Minister Gaddafi was captured in Libya in 2011 – explained how a secondary post he had made (for which he wrote in his primary post, “have moved the older updates here”) did not get many upvotes (only three points in total), but he wanted the information available for anyone that might find it useful. Posting them in another thread was better than having old information be removed and unlinked from the main submission. He told me, “I did not probably even care. I think my whole point was to have the latest information in the top comment, but I did not want the older updates to disappear in case someone to refer to them. … I didn't want any information missing so I just moved it to another comment.” He 78 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/39hf9x/reddit_change_selfpost_character_limit_is_now/ 261 mentioned how he had also hit the character limit: “I think a part of it came from trying to be organized about providing all the information which I had, so I had to remove something that I wanted to provide in some way, just in case.” In his mind, it made sense that nobody would bother upvoting information that wasn’t particularly relevant in the moment, but it would be helpful to have that information linked elsewhere on reddit than deleting it outright: “I don't see a reason why people would upvote it because the latest ... everybody who is coming afterwards would only care about whatever is the latest available right now. If it's somebody who visited an hour back is probably not going to come back again into the thread to kind of check the information again I guess. I didn't think at all about the karma in the other one.” In other cases, certain subreddits where participants contribute updates did not have large audiences, so they did not receive the same, large amount of upvotes as in bigger (usually default) subreddits. Alphaque explained how in these smaller communities (like the medium- sized /r/NewZealand, which has over 66,000 subscribers, where he aggregated information about the Christchurch earthquakes back in early 2011), the lower amount of activity meant that there was less reliance on crowd voting to achieve visibility. Visibility still mattered, but the amount of upvotes was less critical to producing that visibility. For instance, when I mentioned to him that his post “didn't really seem to get much traction with 92 points and 106 votes,” he replied, “No. I guess also this was in New Zealand subreddit versus the other one was from /r/worldnews.” I followed up to ask if upvotes mattered in a smaller subreddit like New Zealand’s, and he said, “For this, no. The whole point of me doing it was just for visibility.” During the course of a developing event, a participant might feel worried about gaining visibility until the audience reached a certain threshold. If enough attention on a post manifests in the form of votes and comments (that I illustrated in Chapter 4 as “feedback”), the contributor 262 might feel more comfortable that it would eventually reach great success. Related to the MH370 crash, mrgandw was worried at first: “[Attention] was [a concern] briefly. Basically, what happened is my timeline started off as a comment in the original /r/news thread. What I would do is I'd be like, ‘Okay, guys. I'm running out of space here, so link to my next part of the timeline, if you're interested.’” He recounted though how this feedback loop calmed his nerves about getting enough attention. “I was concerned at first, but as more and more people got invested in the timeline and discussing what happened, it rose to the top really quickly. I would actually go on the front page and be like, ‘Hey, look, that's my post.’” As he gained upvotes and especially after the moderators provided manual visibility to the post, he could see that it had succeeded is gaining attention: [P]eople would catch interest, and they'd see the timeline threads, and they would just upvote it by the hundreds. … It took off, for sure, and then the mods stickying it helped keep it visible to everyone who visited /r/news. It was pretty cool. A lot of our comments too, even. It was always kind of funny how I could literally post a comment and be like, “Hey guys, thanks” … and that would get some 500 upvotes… [T]here was a lot of interest around this, so the threads would take off very quickly. The concerns about visibility expressed above highlight the issues that network gatekeeping introduce, where those who play the roles of gatekeepers might encounter other actors with different motivations, values, and abilities to control information. Platform Governance: Moderators & Admins In the last quote, mrgandw mentioned that the moderators of /r/news provided immediate, manual visibility to his post by using the privileges they had been granted as mods. In the next section, I look into these instances of moderator and administrator power as they use their privileges to monitor and mediate information aggregation. While on one hand the design of the platform mediates how participants contribute information, on the other hand reddit’s design also impacts social relationships and roles. As 263 we’ve seen numerous times already in this dissertation, moderators – volunteer users who set and police the rules of a subreddit – and administrators – employees of reddit who design and monitor the platforms – played important roles in collaboration. In this section, though, I focus on moderators and administrators as gatekeepers that by design introduce complications and conflicts into peer information aggregation workflows. These social roles in particular highlight the varying amount of political power that contributors have within reddit’s ecosystem but especially during critical moments like information aggregation during developing news events. Administrators exact the most power of reddit’s communities and platform, providing them political power to shape the content and structure that resides on reddit in an absolute manner. Moderators are chosen at the creation of or during the lifetime of a subreddit, and the user accounts of moderators are granted additional privileges within their particular communities. Administrators, on the other hand, are hired by the company and – as a group – possess wider power over the direction and utility of reddit’s platform. The distinction is that moderators can exact decisions as individuals or a team within specific communities, while administrators as a group can shape the entirety of reddit’s community network. Unlike administrators, moderators cannot change algorithms and other platform-based features. Administrators that I talked to, though, mentioned that they preferred to be hands off in dealing with moderators, because mods should enact and mediate the behaviors of members of their respective subreddits. Below, I explore in more depth the traditional gatekeeping roles that these platform- and organization-defined positions hold, both in terms of including and removing content as well as specific decisions around promotion and reorganization of information during particular situations (especially developing events). Just as I illustrated above with voting, user roles 264 defined by reddit’s platform and company also impact in particular ways the visibility of information, leading to conflicts and concerns amongst the general user base when they do not have nor understand these capabilities. Infrastructure, Engineering, & Design Unlike regular users, moderators and especially administrators interacted with the reddit’s platform design in restricted ways. First, I explore their role in design work. Servers Above all other responsibilities, administrators are responsible for reddit’s infrastructure, namely server connectivity and platform design. Basic issues around infrastructural maintenance lead to significant complications during coordination of participants during developing news events. For example, when a particularly large event occurs – like the November 2015 Paris attacks – the exponential increase in viewers hitting reddit’s servers causes them to crash, taking the site offline (see Figure 18 below). 265 Figure 18. Screenshot of the /r/worldnews subreddit after the late 2015 Paris attacks. At various moments, reddit’s servers crashed, sending this message to viewers. While the lack of server connectivity was definitely a problem for readers, it was also an important moment in which aggregation contributors needed to find and use alternate ways of communication to coordinate their activities. As HJonGoldrake explained, his team had to take on additional coordination tasks as reddit’s pages showed 404 errors in various locations during the Paris attacks’ aftermath: Then we had the times where reddit was going down – was not available – and we were trying to see who had access right then, because actually not everyone lost access at the same time. Several times, I had moderators in northern Europe [who] lost access, and like the guys in eastern and southern Europe still with access and [who] could work. We tried to shift actions that weren't going through from one group to the group that still had access. Problems with server connectivity also influenced the ultimate design of the reddit live thread feature. Administrators began designing the feature after they began to see an uptick in the frequency of posts and comments being used for multiple consecutive edits over the course of 266 long periods. A former administrator told me, “Some of the individual threads that people would update, they were basically updating it by using the “edit” feature to a text post or a comment… It was never designed to be done a hundred times in an hour. That feature was designed for people to fix typing or grammar or make an update or two. Not to make updates every minute for an hour.” He said, from the engineering side, the biggest concern revolved around server load and goals to reduce and technical complexity of frequent interactions from users updating during developing events: “[The submissions] would just not function. We also didn't create it for people to be hitting ‘refresh’ every two seconds at volume. Just the way the live update tool works, it auto-refreshes and it's just architected in a more light-weight way so… it can sustain hundreds of thousands of people at once.” The design of the site also depended heavily on organizational priorities. One of the biggest issues for the team, according to this former admin, was a lack of “resources” and “being understaffed,” particularly when the team’s attention had to be directed to responding to natural disasters or other crises. He explained that at the end of the day, while the team would have liked to do many experimental interventions related to news and emergency response (like the creation of the /r/sandy subreddit, which again was an administrator-promoted space for users to react to Hurricane Sandy), the team just didn’t have the time, especially when the primary goal was to keep the site online. He stated, “We didn't want to do something like [/r/sandy] and not be able to support it, both technically and sort of community management wise. A lot of times in those sort of moments, when a lot of something’s going on, like a hurricane or a big news event, it was all we could do to just keep things up.” 267 Ranking Algorithms Administrators also have control over other parts of infrastructure. In particular, the most notable piece of the platform that they design and control is the network’s ranking algorithms. A variety of ranking algorithms exist on reddit: the default is “hot,” which takes into account the number of upvotes, downvotes, and seconds since the submission was posted (see Figure 19 below). Others include “top,” “rising,” “controversial,” and “new.” Comments may also be ranked by “best” (which, like “hot,” takes into account time) and “q/a” (for specific use cases related to question asking). Figure 19. Mathematical notation for the “hot” algorithm on reddit. 79 The ranking algorithms determine the day-to-day routines of reddit’s communities and affect the expectations of when new content will likely appear at the top of each subreddit. 79 https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9 268 Once reddit users have been active on the platform for some time – as all of those interviewed were – they become more keenly aware of how the algorithms can affect information (but not necessarily how they exactly work). In recent years, though, many members of the reddit community have increasingly complained about issues with reddit’s default hotness algorithm. In October 2015, the current CEO of reddit, Steve Huffman, claimed, “The number of votes has simply outpaced the hotness algorithm… I'm 90 percent sure it's as simple as that. The other 10 percent is, maybe there's something else going on.” 80 On August 6, 2015, engineers implemented a change to the front page “hot” algorithm that would raise the cap on the amount of votes a submission could receive. 81 According to reddit administrator Deimorz, some changes like capping the number of votes actually had to remain, to stay in check with prior infrastructure design. 82 Many people reacted negatively, claiming that their front pages were not turning over as quickly as before. 83 Due to “less turnover of popular posts,” these changes were reverted. 84 Participants perceptions of how ranking algorithms work conflicted with the information aggregation work they did, but they had little power to figure out if changes were made or what the effect of changes were. For instance, SebayaKeto, one of the moderators of the /r/SyrianCivilWar news subreddit, described the perceptions around how the change in the algorithm ranking implemented by administrators led many users to believe that the entire system revealed incoming stories in a slower manner. She noted the confusion in the community: 80 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/reddit-admits-its-front-page-is-broken-is-working-on-an-entirely-new-algorithm 81 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_change_the_scores_of_extremelypopular/ 82 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/29j5uh/reddit_still_artificially_introduces_downvotes_on/cim 3pld?context=1 83 For example, see https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3n7tnz/why_arent_massive_news_stories_hitting_my_front/ 84 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_change_the_scores_of_extremelypopular/ 269 “It's something actually that's been a big discussion on reddit the past couple of months… Many users were upset that because the posts about the terrorist attacks came to the front page only a few hours of being upvoted, that they heard about the attacks on CNN before they heard about them on reddit, and many users were offended by that.” She also mentioned the lack of agency regular users have in voicing their concerns or impacting changes in relation to their expectations of how the system should work: “I think [that’s a valid complaint] because, had it been a year ago, posts about the attacks being upvoted as heavily as they were would have been on the front page of the site within minutes. … [W]e weren't able to control the upvoting algorithm: that was something the admins do site wide.” Having a lot of experience across many instances of aggregation, shankee claimed that people had been disgruntled with the perceived increase in slow information turnover for a while: “There have been a lot of complaints recently with the supposedly new algorithm to determine what gets popularity and what gets upvoted more. Yeah, it's difficult, but I don't think it has really changed a lot. Like people said, I've heard arguments that they heard news first on reddit years ago, and now that isn't the case anymore.” However, even veteran community members identified and were consistently aware of these issues as they monitored the site for news. For example, theearthquakeguy argued that he had thought news events were appearing slower, but the success of one story about a hostage situation at a resort hotel in Mali seemed to counter these perceptions: “Recently, due to the algorithm changes to the front page and whatnot, it's become a bit slow. I think it was kind of clear last night slash this morning, with the Mali hostage crisis. They've either intervened or changed the algorithm again, because that hit the front page pretty quickly.” 270 Still, participants recognized the ways in which the algorithm worked as a notable aspect of the platform and truly core to the reddit experience. Contributors might base their current perceptions of the operation of infrastructure with past experiences. One interviewee recalled how the community feels like the ranking algorithm has changed over time, and the past “felt” better: [I]ts algorithm has changed over time I guess… I know that recently there have been a lot of complaints, that people are saying, “If something happened in the world, I used to find out about it first on reddit because there would be a post immediately.” Whereas now someone says, “I saw this on TV, and then I saw it on reddit.” There is ... almost a lag moment that didn't used to exist then. I don't want to say good old days, but kind of. The problem with these kind of claims is that it is extremely difficult to account for the increase in voters on reddit’s platform and its impact on ranking, without having transparent metrics provided to ordinary users. Generally, the user base of reddit did not have access to the inner workings of the algorithms: while the code is open-source, engineers tweak how the code and platform work on the backend, particularly to prevent spam. Due to the lack of transparency, users must come up with their own folk theories about how these algorithms operate. The change in the hot algorithm in 2015, for instance, still had ramifications for how people thought reddit’s system worked, even when administrators announced that the change had been rolled back. It remains unclear if these perceptions have actually influenced – and therefore reshaped – the behaviors of participants (potentially leading to a real impact on ranking). Moderators and Tools While administrators control the ranking algorithms, moderators do have some leeway to change settings within their particular subreddits. Tools and privileges designed by administrators filter down as permissions to the moderator user role. Moderators can then change the way that 271 participants in their communities interact with algorithms (and therefore interact differently with content). In April 2015, administrators announced that they designed a “suggested sort” feature for moderators, where mods could set a default comment sorting algorithm for particular threads or even entire subreddits. One moderator, kash_if, explained – using the example of a political election thread – how he and his team decided to implement this change during emerging spikes in activity around developing events: “One of the moderators made this thread. It was sorted by new, because whatever is the latest anybody is commenting is accessed right away, instead of top.” The team decided to continue using similar approaches because it helped in the particular context of developing events, compared to regular submissions: “With a breaking story now, what we've started doing is we've started sorting it by new. … It is one of the options that we get, which is called a ‘suggest sort.’ In any thread we can do that, but we only do it with threads like these.” To reiterate, these changes in algorithm function and use are not decisions that the userbases of particular subreddits get to make. Occasionally, moderators will engage with community-driven conversations about how a subreddit should be run, but generally moderators and especially administrators make decisions without the input of ordinary users. What is important to note, though, is that these community conversations do have the potential to push back. For instance, administrators create tools for moderators to better monitor their subreddits, but over the past few years, I have encountered numerous occasions where moderators would complain about the lack of attention given to these tools and also basic attention to moderator concerns generally. For example, in his experience as a moderator of various subreddits, naly_d illustrated the lack of support from admins related to tools and features, arguing that admins 272 should be tasked with monitoring site-wide statistics about bad behavior just as much as moderators: What reddit needs – and this is speaking as a moderator and as someone who's done live threads – is better admin support, better attention from the admins. When something is getting a lot of eyes on it, admins should definitely be taking down the activity of the other people in that thread. Whether it's finding people who are trolling from the same IP address, that sort of stuff. Admin should definitely be taking a bigger view of the site because if something went wrong, it would impact them as significantly as it does when something goes right. The sentiment that administrators were not responding in a timely manner to moderators’ requests for tools also spawned collective action initiatives. One notable example of one of these projects was “Toolbox” (/r/toolbox), which provides a user-driven set of moderator tool extensions. 85 More recently, another remarkable collective action movement was “Blackout 2015,” a coordinated protest amongst a collective of moderators which in part was a response to moderators’ grievances (e.g., “[M]oderators consistently described the workload as a major motivation for joining the blackout,” in addition to other impactful decisions that were perceived as negative by the user network; Matias, 2016). Moderators coordinated to shut down (i.e., make private) numerous subreddits, leading administrators to make public statements about site-wide changes and future support for tools and features. 86 Monitoring & Deleting While administrators and sometimes moderators have greater control over the infrastructure of reddit’s platform compared to ordinary participants, there are particular privileges that moderator and admin accounts possess that play a larger role in the day-to-day conflicts with users, particularly those who volunteer to do peer information aggregation work. Deletion, as well as 85 https://www.reddit.com/r/toolbox 86 http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/07/reddit_amageddon_what_it_s_really_about.html 273 banning, remained one of the more controversial powers that ordinary users do not possess, leading to numerous conflicts around the site, and significantly affected the dynamics of information gatekeeping. Administrators have claimed that they generally try to be hands off in relation to the content that appears on the site. In the past – and especially in 2015 – there were actions taken by the team to remove specific types of content and subreddits (certain types of pornography, abusive users, and inflammatory messages) from the site. 87 However, for news- related content, most of the policing of appropriate contributors falls on the hands of moderators. Moderators play a pivotal role in monitoring content within their subreddits: not only do they set the rules and agenda for a specific community, but they are also tasked with the removal of content (and sometimes users) from the subreddit. Evaluation and deletion of user-contributed information is a daily assignment for moderators, though these duties increase during breaking news situations. Usually, though, the increase in such tasks is shaped by “big” events: smaller (e.g., local) stories are not necessarily policed unless they are particularly tense (for instance, political elections or crises inflected by race, religion, etc.). Monitoring Monitoring content plays a large role in subreddit maintenance, though the particular actions taken relate to the rules of the community and the moderation team in place. For example, the major news subreddits (/r/news and /r/worldnews) have an explicit set of guidelines that moderators require participants to follow. On the other hand, in smaller or newer subreddits, the moderation can be more flexible. In the /r/sandy subreddit, the subreddit did not initially have straightforward rules, and the moderation team was relatively new (to working with each other, as well as dealing with the particular types of disaster-related information being shared). 87 http://mashable.com/2015/08/05/reddit-crack-down/#al39mpfbFPqP 274 Andreas, one of the moderators of the subreddit, explained that, in reaction to an increase in the amount of humorous content contributed to the subreddit, the moderation team had to discuss what to do with content that they were not comfortable with (i.e., jokes), when they wanted the subreddit to be a space to share serious information and news: I was in that discussion, in a mod discussion. … And I think that, as a AskScience moderator, I was definitely on the side of, “We need to get rid of this shit,” because it doesn't have a place here. You can post it to /r/funny if you've got anything funny. Yeah, my opinion is that Reddit shouldn't only be for jokes. And so there's a place for jokes, and that means you'd have a place for serious discussions as well. … And I saw the humor-ers being trollish. So, it was about our people in dire need and property being destroyed. You know? It was very, very easy to remove that stuff and not being like, “Oh, I'm being a party pooper.” I'm cleaning up the trash. For some moderator teams, the policies were flexible and evolving. SebayaKeto explained that, when moderating the /r/SyrianCivilWar subreddit in its early days, they tested out varying styles of restriction, even combining their own judgment with community input: “My primary role was law enforcement basically. I was in charge of the moderators who kept the peace as best we could, because especially those first couple of months, the wars and the comments that were particularly brutal.” Early attempts at hard-handed approaches were unsuccessful; as she illustrated, “Originally we tried to be as strict as possible. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the /r/AskHistorians subreddit, but they're extremely draconian and unforgiving. That lasted about six hours.” The mod team eventually shifted to being inclusive of the community’s opinions while maintaining a gradual rigorousness: “We moved to a three-strike policy. It ended up with us having to really almost create a dictionary of what would be considered an offensive term. ‘Assadist,’ for instance: many users championed that cause, for that word to be banned, and eventually it was.” Sometimes rules limited the potentials of contributors’ skills in reporting. One of the most notable examples I encountered was speaking with theearthquakeguy about the early days 275 of his aggregation activities. He explained that he has always preferred playing a role that helps contribute official source information to reddit’s communities. However, in the major news subreddits like /r/worldnews, there are strict rules about the kinds of links you can contribute. He lamented that, because URL links to expert, scientific sources of earthquake information are not links to news organization websites, he could not actually post the best earthquake information when it occurred. “If I can get an earthquake story out there through the USGS as a source, I'll do it. But most recently, we've actually been in contact with the moderators, and they've been saying it's not actually a news source.” Instead, he had to respond to individual posts that linked to news organizations’ sites, after which he could then comment with the expert information: “And they're completely right, but I'd much rather link to the USGS – who acquired the actual information – than I would to, say, some shitty online site that has ultimately no sort of credibility and is constantly sensationalizing the actual event.” In grey-area situations, while not common, moderators usually told me that their teams came together to discuss final decisions. Depending on the subreddit, community feedback might be integrated into the decision making process. One moderator, SlyRatchet, recounted that the goal of his teams were not to ignore members of the community, but moderators still needed to retain control: “[W]e're not going to turn a subreddit into a democracy, but we're not going to entirely ignore the users either.” However, in cases like deletion, participants were not necessarily consulted, and sometimes they even weren’t even aware that a moderator had taken action on their contribution. Deleting One of the primary privileges that the moderator user role gains, in comparison to a regular user account, is the ability to delete posts and comments. Moderators are tasked by the site’s Content 276 Policy to help remove inappropriate content, and the administrators make it explicit that moderators may have their own subreddit rules related to removing contributions. 88 The removal of content from subreddits is fairly common: usually these removals relate to content that breaks subreddit rules, though it could also relate to other moderator-driven decisions, as well as basic janitorial tasks like removing spam. The ability to delete content is a powerful privilege that introduces numerous conflicts to information aggregation, especially during high-tempo periods like breaking news events. In developing news situations, the removal of content can be particularly critical, as hundreds or thousands of comments might potentially disappear in an instant depending on the rules of a subreddit. While individuals and groups in aggregation situations might be able to control information in novel ways, these aspects of gatekeeping sometimes contradict and challenge that work by immediately changing the task at hand. Some participants told me that on numerous occasions a post or comment that they had been working on, even while they were in the middle of updating, suddenly became unavailable. Usually they were not informed by any moderator, and even on their own computer screens, it was not entirely clear that the contribution had been deleted. Instead, they found out through messages from other viewers, who were confused why the post had vanished. When updating about an active shooter situation, Tony explained that he was told in private messages that his comment updates had been deleted: “At one point, [the police scanner] said the name of this guy, and I don't know if I typed it in right or not, but I just put it down there. … Then maybe about 3 minutes after that … This was weird. This has never happened to me before. I still had access to the thread. I could still update it, but people were asking me why I deleted it or why I took it 88 https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy 277 down.” He was still not entirely sure how or why it had been removed, guessing, “A couple people suggested that in similar circumstances in the past, they had taken down those forums from being visible… If something comes to life later that [the name] wasn't correct, then it could result in negative circumstances for the person who was falsely named. I suspect that they took it down from it being visible to everybody because I had put that there.” He decided to edit the information he had included, but by the time he had reacted, the original thread reappeared. “I took it down kind of suspecting that. Then, by that time, I had duplicated the text and started a separate thread, but I ended up deleting that because they re-enabled the original thread…” In another circumstance, a contributor was updating across a few comments during the Boston Marathon Bombing in the /r/worldnews subreddit. His post disappeared from others’ views too: “There were a couple times where the post was either hidden from the front page or hidden from the subreddit, where it wasn't deleted – all the comments were still there – but it just didn't show up on the subreddit listing anymore.” In reaction to one of the comments, other users were responding about the comment seemingly having been deleted by moderators, such as “Mods stop deleting these posts” and “Boston Marathon is a world event, mods” (referring to the reason for the removal being breaking a subreddit rule). The contributor explained that he ended up copying and pasting it to maintain its visibility: I could go back by clicking on my profile, clicking context on a comment, and seeing what is there. Then I could take my post and copy it to whatever was the top thread … I think I did that at two points… I don't think [this was the last thread that I posted in], because I think at the time, when there was a new thread that was posted, I posted what I wrote, and then someone posted an even better one, and theirs got upvoted more, and my work is done. When I inquired if a moderator or administrator had not informed him that the comment was going to be hidden or deleted, he responded, “Correct.” 278 Contributors regularly expressed frustration with moderators’ powers to delete content in cases when there was not necessarily a clear violation (like abusive language, which definitely broke the site’s rules). Especially in high-tempo situations, the removal of content meant that they needed to go out of their way to continue providing updates. Frequently – and I encountered this on numerous occasions when looking at other events – contributors would re-post aggregated information into new threads, to continue providing the service of news updates. Peva3, who updated during a shooter situation in Washington, DC, expressed how difficult it was when he encountered a post that was deleted and the annoyance of having to direct attention to a new thread. “It is so stupid because sometimes there's posts that are on the front page for a while and have a lot of comments and then they get deleted by the moderators and then it just pops up on another one.” In general, he explained that it was difficult enough to search for the one thread out of the many posted that would matter the most: “There's always a ton of threads, and for me, it has been before really difficult for me to go through them and figure out which one has the best people posting on it and all that kind of stuff.” He then went on to explained how some posts that get really popular eventually move around to different spaces: I don't know if there is a communication on moderators where this is the official thread for this event, but it feels like at first it is a very organic free for all, either it is completely organic and everything gets kind of condensed into one thread, or it gets kind of moderated to that. There's a lot of times… you would see a post on /r/news, and then the moderators would delete it, and then it would pop up on another subreddit, and then they wouldn't delete it there, and the comments would just get completely crazy, and then hours later it would be deleted. There is another thread on /r/OutOfTheLoop where people are saying, “What the fuck just happened? What's going on?” It's kind of crazy to follow that kind of stuff, because it feels like it is constantly in a state of disappearing and appearing at the same time. Sometimes the confusion around the deletion of a contribution stems from an actual mistake on the part of moderators. For instance, on April 15, 2013, one URL submission related to the Boston Marathon bombings was added to the /r/worldnews subreddit, and it was promptly 279 deleted after receiving a significant number of upvotes and comments, reaching the top of the subreddit. 89 Years later, many of the top comments reflect viewers’ anger at the sudden disappearance, such as the most-voted comment, which suggests that the thread disappeared multiple times: “Mods, stop deleting these posts! Are you fucking kidding me. Edit: now that this thread is sticking around, get something with real info to the top. Edit 2: Again?! Now this thread is deleted? Mods should be ashamed of themselves. Some of us have loved ones in Boston and turn to Reddit for information.” On the following day, a moderator in the /r/worldnews subreddit contributed a text post titled “RE: recent events at /r/worldnews.” 90 In the description, the mod explained the reason for its removal, which apparently stemmed from disagreement over breaking the rules, from automated removals (spam filter), moderators (who make a decision to delete it), as well as users (who had apparently sent in “40+ reports” to take it down). In a rare situation, the moderator provided a small window of visibility into the process of moderator actions and even concluded the post with an apology: “I think we could have handled this better, and we will try our best to prevent situations like this from arising in the future.” In another situation, theearthquakeguy, detailed one of these moments that occurred in the hours proceeding the November 2015 Paris attacks. He said that moderators removed a post in French, even though it gained a lot of traction: “I can't believe it happened: one of the first threads that reported the hostage taking yesterday was in French, and it clearly stated that in the title there, it said French. After it had like 4,000-5,000 upvotes, the moderators removed it because it wasn't in English.” The problem, according to him, was that all of the critical information and discussion became instantly lost: “So you immediately have all of this relevant 89 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1cerrp/boston_marathon_explosions_dozens_wounded_as_two/ 90 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1cgo06/re_recent_events_at_rworldnews/ 280 and informative conversation going on, and now you can't access it anymore; or rather, it's not available to incoming individuals whilst another source is that may not have that same sort of level [of quality], because all of the main contributors have [already] been posting on that.” DonTago, one of the /r/worldnews moderators who was in charge at the time, offered up an explanation. He admitted that moderators frequently have to deal with grey-area problems, and even in cases when a contribution clearly breaks a rule, pressure from the community may put the impetus on the moderators to retroactively allow the post to stay up. He explained that moderators need to come to a decision if a particular post might benefit the community even though it breaks the subreddit rules: [W]ith any submission that breaks any sort of fundamental rule that gets a lot of upvotes, a decision has to be made. Is this submission in the best interest of the subscriber base? Is it breaking some fundamental aspect of what the mission of the subreddit is? … It generally ends up being a judgment call as far as those high level submissions go. When I inquired as to the exact post, he recounted how it was likely decided by one choice of a moderator: “I think in that case it was a younger moderator that removed it without consulting others, if I remember correctly. That was reassessed after it was decided that it was in the best interest to put it back up.” The pushback led to a conversation amongst the moderator team, where they vetted the value of allowing the post in the end: I think one of the moderators was saying that when it comes to something as crucial as that, even though it might be breaking the fundamental rules of the sub, which is the submissions all should be in English for the greater benefit of the readers. Just because of the gravity of the situation, executive decisions need to be made allowing such a thing, when it comes to really personal information being made available to the subscriber base. It was breaking the rules, but it was for the overall benefit to have it approved at the end of the day. DonTago also explained how the structure of organization between moderators also could lead to a distributed decision-making process, where a team of moderators would be on call to discuss and to deal with these unique situations. He said, “But there are certainly mods who have been 281 there longer who are better experienced in making these tougher calls. If there is a submission at the very top of the subreddit that has gotten a couple thousand votes, but it is suddenly found to be violating some fundamental rule of subreddits, there will certainly be a discussion in mod mail about that.” However, he noted, the more experienced moderators would likely be the ones to make the final call, to make sure that the proper decision has been reached: Certainly the moderators that have been doing it for the longest try to lead or take the bull by the horns, if you will, as far as being the final decisions makers. The newer mods tend to throw their input in, but at the end of the day, I would not call it a hierarchy, because it is not really a hierarchy. … Views are exchanged as far as what a course of action would be. It is generally the older moderators that would make that call rather than the newer ones, obviously. Leave those kind of personal decisions to people that are better experienced in making them. In many instances, though, the deletion work of moderators is not especially controversial. Frequently, moderators will spend a lot of time deleting posts that do not get a lot of attention, particularly during breaking news events when potentially dozens or hundreds of posts are contributed by the vast network of reddit users (such as those deleted by moderators after an earthquake; see Figure 20): “Reddit actually warns you, ‘Hey, this has already been submitted in the subreddit. Do you want to do it again?’ Occasionally, you get a ‘race’ condition, where everybody hits submit at the same second [to try to be first], and obviously they're not going to know about each other.” In the /r/aviation subreddit, one moderator explained that, after the MH370 incident, they decided to delete posts that were duplicates or contained overlapping content. He said: “Yeah, [we ended up deleting] a little bit of it. Usually our submitters are pretty good. We tend to delete maybe 20-30% of the stuff that comes in, just as sort of an offhand guess. I don't recall it being significantly different; there was just a lot more material coming in.” He continued, explaining how the moderators then delete content from larger waves of attention: “Probably the biggest issue that we uncovered was a news story would break, and then six or 282 seven people would all submit it at the same time. ‘Okay, well, who submitted it first? Is there one that's already got upvotes and comments going?’ Then just remove all the duplicates.” When I then asked why the moderators would bother deleting duplicates instead of keeping them, he returned to the idea of balance: “Because users don't want to see the same story five different places in the /r/aviation ‘new’ feed.” Figure 20. In chronological order, the titles of the posts deleted by moderators of the /r/losangeles subreddit within the first hour after an earthquake in Los Angeles. 283 In some cases, though, moderators did not necessarily want to delete content, but felt that they could help situate information in appropriate places. These kind of decisions seem particularly appropriate amongst smaller subreddits, where the specific topics are much more niche and focused. The same /r/aviation moderator, for instance, explained that the moderation team policed what kinds of information would be allowed in the subreddit versus what kind of information and news updates about the MH17 attack and crash in July 2014. He explained: “Basically, my thought process was I thought pretty clear in that link. Basically, yeah, while MH17 is pretty tragic and all that, we don't want to completely filter it out, but there's also a completely separate sub[reddit] that's set up for it.” He said that they wanted to keep as much as possible, but they ended up removing some submissions: “We didn't actually end up deleting all that much stuff there; it was more of a ‘Hey, let's try to keep the subreddit focused on what it's about…’ I care very deeply about a lot of things, but most of them don't belong in /r/aviation.” Tools: AutoModerator Moderators utilize other methods for tracking content to potentially delete. One of the most important resources in their toolkit is AutoModerator, a bot created by the reddit community (that was later embraced by administrators and further integrated into the platform) that allows moderators to implement keyword detection for finding instances of rule breaking or automating formatting and discussion threads. 91 Moderators noted that, during breaking news events, AutoModerator was a crucial tool in mitigating tasks during the flood of users and contributions. As an experienced moderator, SebayaKeto described her team’s use of the bot as the “first line of defense”: [A]ll the moderators always have a first line of defense. Because the way reddit works is, if we ban your account, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from making a new 91 https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator 284 account with a new email and coming back and saying all the same things. Our first line of defense was AutoModerator, [which] would automatically flag and delete posts by user accounts that were under three days old. However, use of AutoModerator occasionally interrupted moderators’ workflows by making monitoring more difficult. As SpAn12 explained, increased traffic in reaction to developing events means more work: “A lot of work was then removing comments because of the increased traffic. There was simply a huge amount of work, and it was at that stage where we edited the AutoModerator rules to hopefully decrease our workload, but it increased it. It flags up different things.” Unfortunately, by identifying posts to delete, moderators had to manually go in and double check them: “You can set up to automatically remove comments, which it was automatically doing. But in the case of UK accounts, it would flag those comments after us, but we'd have to go and read them manually and then delete them manually as well. While it makes things more visible, the work that needs to be done is increased. It front loads it.” AutoModerator, of course, is a basic program that can automate simple tasks, which means that its use can lead to many false positives (and therefore lead to additional complications with subreddit community members). Empw, a moderator of a non-news subreddit, filled me in on how abusive users can take advantage of the simple system by sending in false reports to take down content. He said that he, as a contributing user, encountered posts being removed when participating in a news-related subreddit, and he highlighted the importance of moderators watching the various alerts and lists provided by reddit’s system. In his case, other users might report posts to get them taken down, though some moderators stay on top of improper deletions: “I spent a couple times saying, ‘Oh hey guys, it's been removed. Can you reapprove?’ There were times when I didn't have to do that, because these people were here and they understand – especially /r/worldnews and /r/news – they understand that people are going to 285 be dicks. They're going to report stuff, and those kinds of situations are going to happen.” Moderators thus are asked with the a more complex job of monitoring user behavior as well as the system’s behavior: You got to keep an eye on your mod queue 24/7 in something like that. For them, it's not like they're removing stuff or deleting stuff. It's more they're reapproving it. They're in this position where they've got so much going on that things fall through the cracks, and they have to be reminded, "Could you please reapprove this? Yada, yada, yada.” … They really have to be on their Ps and Qs to keep it as functional as possible and as accurate as possible. Especially for larger subreddits, these system mishaps occur at a much higher rate, complicating the job of moderators, particularly during urgent developing events. He reminded me, “You got to be on top of the mod queue, and that's why you have to have a lot of moderators, especially in a place like /r/worldnews. It's got 10 million people. If you don't have 20 mods, it's going to be a nightmare.” Differences in Live Threads Live threads were particularly interesting case studies for understating the implications of platform-defined power related to deletion, because – uniquely – ordinary users that became editors within live threads gained temporary deletion permissions. These users were tasked with monitoring everyone else’s contributions to the live thread, and they were able to remove any other person’s contributions to the thread. In addition, moderators tended to oversee particular live threads, even though live threads existed outside of subreddits (again, they can be posted into subreddits as URL submissions, but they are posted automatically within /r/live, the primary hosting subreddit). Jurisdiction over live threads therefore relied on moderators to stay on top of developing events as their attention grew and to work with ordinary users that created and contributed to live threads. 286 One interesting distinction that I encountered when talking to contributors and moderators about live thread participation was that users tended not to remove content by other people, but moderators felt it was an imperative part of their role to intervene when necessary. For example, teller8 explained his role as a contributor where he avoided deletion of others’ contributions. “[S]ometimes people would double post. Like two people would post the same thing at the exact same time. And if that was the case, we would just have one person… I think they used crossing out. We never deleted.” Another contributor to some live threads, MaximaxII, similarly recalled a focus on transparency rather than deletion when helping to monitor a live thread. When I asked about one contribution with a strike-through, he responded: “I'll usually go back and cross it out, if it turned out to be false. I think it's better than deleting it, because people can't see that it's false if it's deleted.” However, in certain instances he did mention that he would delete duplicates, like the moderators detailed earlier: “I would delete something if there was a duplicate, and one had a better source than the other. For example, if I posted a link to the original source and someone posted a link to something that had a link to the original source, I would usually delete the other one.” But it was still uncommon for him: “That happened, I did the live thread also from the Paris attacks from last week, but I almost never do it.” On the other hand, moderators did feel comfortable removing some things from live threads. In general, it seemed like moderators were much more keen on removing inaccurate or unconfirmed information. “We would – as things were being added by other commentators – we would remove some which we felt were not of a high standard.” SpAn12 explained regarding one of the live threads used in the late 2015 Paris attacks, the goal was to focus on a feed that was easy for viewers to consume: “Especially early on, it was a bit of a free for all, and you'd be removing things, not just if you've thought they might be inaccurate or unsubstantiated or not 287 backed up by fact. But you'd also aesthetically want to have a live stream which was easily readable that was filled with hyperbole or making the situation out to be something which it wasn't.” In a sense, he felt it was a duty: “Obviously in such a situation, it's not very cordial to remove someone else's work immediately after they've done it, but we felt that had to be done.” Further, the goal was to focus on a higher quality feed with proper sources; he explained, “We would selectively filter and/or remove stories from better sources. So if one story was posted three times, we would opt for BBC News or Reuters or someone like that. We want to filter down so things weren't repeated, but we'd also want enough content. And we would also want updates posted so we’d jump in and post summaries…” Because moderators wanted these live threads to be well-regarded sources of information, they made sure to be strict about their control over what was posted and what information was allowed to stay: There was quite a lot of heavy-handed moderation regarding the thread and what links were posted and which weren't. … [Y]ou want as much as possible to have some level of standard, because we were frankly we were doing it to provide a public service of information basically, and we wanted it to be a good port of course for people to get their information. Monitoring and Removing Participants Removing contributors became a pivotal point of contention for moderators (and editors of live threads). In some, rarer cases, even moderators were ousted from positions of power in news- related subreddits. While contributors and moderators tended to focus their conversations around the information supplied by other participants, occasionally they would introduce conflicts around the people themselves. Earlier in Chapter 6, we saw how one point in the relationship between contributors and especially moderators was evaluating potential contributors to include in news aggregation, usually based around their prior moderator experience, past post history, or name recognition 288 within particular subreddits. In cases where a contributor or moderator was going to be removed, these decisions came down to agreements between a group of other participants. For example, SlyRatchet, as a mod in the /r/Europe subreddit, explained that there was little coordinated effort to monitor the quality of the tasks that participants were completing during the Paris attacks aggregation: “Yeah, that's a tough one. By and large, we didn't [make sure that the people who are updating in the thread are doing what they’re supposed to be doing].” However, if they felt uncomfortable about any particular individual’s contributions, they might spend some time following their intuition and checking up on that user’s credentials. He explained that sometimes they relied on feedback from other users: “People would tip us off that something was going wrong in the thread. I think we got a lot of meta comments as the day was going by… It wasn't the case very often that the first we were hearing about problems was from users.” Generally, though, moderators explicitly coordinated with each other to monitor the quality of submissions: “Say, me or one of the other mods would be clicking back and forth between things. … We'd be like, ‘This user's… doing something that's a bit iffy.’ If it was something really suspicious, we'd check out their comment history, and be like, ‘Crap. We added a Holocaust denier.’ … We only removed a couple people within the first hour and that was it, I think.” In certain subreddits, the removal of participants followed largely the same approach. SebayaKeto explained how her moderation team kept track of users that did not follow the rules through a system of metadata tags. “It really depended on the users. We had a tagging system, so we would know if the user had been warned or banned before. For our first time offenders, usually you'd take some time to either explain to them what they did wrong or what they could do better or send them a PM.” Sometimes they had to come down on specific individuals multiple times too, saying, “The repeat offenders – and there were a lot of them – usually we'd 289 just be like, ‘This is your second warning. Okay, this is your third warning, so one week ban. Okay, this is your last warning, you're banned for a month.’ And then finally, ‘Okay, you're just banned forever.’ That happened a lot.” She even noted that she had to potentially ban dozens of people when large stories occurred in the news: “When the subreddit is busy, when there's a lot of mainstream new coverage on it… we could be banning dozens of people a day.” In unique cases, moderators needed to remove other mods from their post. The /r/sandy subreddit presented a unique situation for moderators, as a handful of them passed in and out of service over the course of a few days of high activity. In a former interview with one of the moderators, Emily explained how the moderation team had to actually contact reddit administrators to deal with another moderator who was acting against their goals: “We had a problem with one mod and I had to contact [the reddit admins] to get rid of him. I talked with three other mods who I thought also had a problem with him so we had a little vote and I wrote a letter [to the admins] with my concerns.” The administrators ended up stepping in to help: “[They] told him his services were no longer needed… [H]e was going around and undeleting things we deleted (and sent explanatory replies to), just generally undermining. Really hard to deal with…” (Leavitt & Clark, 2014). Regarding administrators’ absolute power, SebayaKeto explained that admins could also issue a “shadowban,” which – when applied to a user account – made it seem like any post was actually contributed to the site, when in fact nobody could see it: “[I]f we could determine, okay this is <username> again, trying to get around his ban, then we can pass that along to the admins who would then issue a shadowban and just keep them off the site.” These examples illustrate how control over information channels through powers like deletion definitely shape the ways in which participants aggregate information. However, not all 290 control is related to removal. In the next section, I explore similar concerns related to purposeful forced visibility. Direct Promotion: Circumventing Design In the last section, I primarily focused on how moderators and administrators evaluate and remove particular types of information and participants. However, moderators and administrators within reddit’s ecosystem have developed a number of innovations in the past few years that attempt to provide greater visibility to content, particularly during critical moments of developing events. These decisions also play into the facet of network gatekeeping related to political power because ordinary users do not necessarily have the capabilities to execute these kind of promotional actions, but they are greatly affected as gatekeepers themselves, because immediate promotion means that they need to adjust the ways in which they aggregate information. Over the past few years, as the wider set of audiences on reddit depend on the site more and more for critical information during crises, it has become more and more important for the platform to surface that information quickly. While ranking algorithms determine what content reaches the top of any given page, earlier in this chapter I outlined how participants worry about visibility (and how this has increased over time). Any way to manually promote information therefore largely bypasses the deterministic structure of reddit’s algorithmic design, which is a primary expectation for how reddit should work. Moderators addressed initial concerns about immediate promotion with user-led innovations. As theearthquakeguy pointed out to me, routines could be – and in fact were – developed to bring visibility to content quicker: “I think there does need to be a tool for moderators to actually make the relevant stories stand out in a relevant thread. So kind of how /r/movies does the ‘trailer threads,’ perhaps that’s something that /r/worldnews needs to look into 291 to find an official source and just say, ‘Look, this is it.’” Yet over time, as these user innovations had been adopted more and more, administrators have actually engineered solutions into the larger system of reddit. This section looks more in depth at these innovations, tools, and features to understand how they bring visibility to certain types of content, providing solutions to issues related to timing, ranking, etc. that were previously discussed in this chapter. Defaulting Explained earlier in this dissertation, reddit provides a set of default subreddits, selected by administrators to display to new accounts or not-logged-in viewers. The default set may change however, and the administration team determines its composition. Importantly, making a subreddit part of the default set (or removing a subreddit from the list) significantly promotes certain content in those subreddits over others. For instance, the decision to promote /r/Europe to an IP-address-based default subreddit significantly shaped the way that Europeans view and discuss news on reddit. Without a doubt this subreddit has become one of the major players for breaking news information that occurs in European geographies. The decision to add a subreddit generally follows a plan by the administration team to provide more balance to reddit’s front page for the average (logged out) viewer. A former moderator, for instance, claimed that the /r/news subreddit was added to the default list in 2013 to provide more news content to the network while balancing out poor moderation from /r/worldnews. 92 Stickied Submissions & Links In the early days of reddit, moderators faced problematic issues around providing important information to their subreddit’s members. Since there was no way to contact the entirety of a 92 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1kn92a/was_rnews_added_to_the_defaults_to_eventually/ 292 subreddit’s subscriber base (e.g., the moderators cannot simply send private messages to all members), moderators would have to submit text posts and rely on the community to upvote them to a high, visible spot in the subreddit. Over time, reddit implemented small changes to make these kind of contributions more obvious: for example, they changed the username design so that moderators’ and administrators’ usernames would show up in different colors, highlighting their distinct user roles. Occasionally, though, these attempts at increasing visibility around particular information quickly relied on moderators coming up with small tweaks, like editing the CSS template of the subreddit to display additional text or images. On August 5, 2013, reddit’s engineers designed and implemented a “sticky” system: moderators would be able to automatically choose a URL or text post to stick to the top of the subreddit, making it the first post above all the other algorithmically-ranked posts. 93 Later, on December 17, 2015, they also added the ability to sticky a comment within a particular post. 94 Stickying content as a feature became adopted broadly by moderators, particularly within news-related subreddits. However, the general idea of needing to provide immediate visibility to content – especially by a method that circumvents the platform’s ranking algorithms – pervaded many conversations with peer information aggregation contributors and moderators, and frequently they mentioned decisions around what and when to sticky. For example, when asked about how moderators react to big events like the 2015 Paris attacks, DonTago explained how the moderation team of /r/worldnews usually considers a number of options to promote 93 https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1jr429/moderators_you_can_now_sticky_a_selfpost_to_the/ On July 14, 2015, they upgraded the system to support 2 stickied posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3d7kat/reddit_change_subreddits_can_now_have_two_sticky/ 94 https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/3x8vzl/moderators_sticky_comments_is_now_available_to/ 293 information immediately. However, because of the immediate nature of crisis events, it requires improvisation to suit a solution to the particular needs of the moment: I wouldn't think there is necessarily a specific kind of protocol or timeline of things that we do when something happens. The nature of these things is they happen fast, they happen suddenly, and before you even know it, there is a submission about the initial reports of the terrorist attacks, and they are on the top of the front page. Generally, we will institute some sort of sticky or something like that. Or the CSS mods will build in some sort of link at the top of the subs to give greater visibility to the events. Maybe linking to some sort of outside resource, whether it be something for victims or something for people in the area as far as resources. A live feed or something like that. There are all sorts of resources we try to link to to make as much information available to the subscriber base as possible. However, moderators do not necessarily need to create a new thread. As excelsior_i explained, acting as a moderator after a major earthquake in Pakistan, one thread in particular “was posted by a user, and it ended up getting lots more comments, so we just made it the main thread and stickied it.” “Sticky” Links For particularly notable events, administrators would also become involved in promoting content manually. Unlike a stickied post within a particular subreddit, though, admins had the ability to post links directly to the front page of the platform, accessing exponentially many more viewers. A secondary reason was to take the load off of reddit’s server infrastructure. As a former admin explained to me, unexpected events in the past could take the engineer team by surprise – “[I]f it's something like Paris… it's unknown and unexpected… yeah, it’s pretty chaotic. And just trying to update stuff or figure out what to do as quick as possible… I'm sure that was chaotic.” In more recent cases, reorienting people to live threads with a link on the front page was ultimately better for the site’s stability: Sometimes there'd be a sporting event or a TV event that was known, but it caught us off guard because we forgot, “Oh yeah, a lot of people are going to be watching that and checking out Reddit.” And that even might take that page – or definitely the site – down.” 294 So just the technical response to support stuff that's ten or a hundred times more than normal is challenging. But we were able to – once we figure out what was going on and what to do we were able to do – put up a live thread quickly. Or if there was one, put it in the section where you see a live thread, live threads more recently sharing on the homepage. Once we had that functionality, reacting was frequent. Stickied links on the front page today have a set format, but in the past, it required a technical workaround to pull off. This kind of administrator-led innovation played a large role in the success of the /r/sandy subreddit. According to a former admin, the /r/sandy subreddit came about from a conversation internally with the administrator team: “We just thought, something like this is a big event for a lot of our audience, and a lot of people want to talk about it but didn't really have any central place to do that.” He explained that it would have been difficult for a new subreddit to gain the required traction fast enough, so the admins promoted it in a manual way that circumvented the organic growth required of any other new subreddit: “Because that's just not the way the site's designed for those communities. Communities can grow really quickly, but not within hours necessarily. So we just thought it made sense for us to step in and just sort of point people in the direction of this sort of room or place to talk about it.” The admins decided to display an advertisement with the goal of “just sort of saying, ‘Hey! Here's a place to go and discuss this and stay safe and hope everyone's okay.’” Then they used the platform’s internal ad unit mechanism to hack a permanent display above the advertisement space on the platform’s front page for all users. The ad first appeared on the homepage of the site on October 29, 2012 (see Figure 21 below). To deal with the surge in activity from that manual promotion, though, the administrators also provided personnel and support: “With something that becomes big like that, often the moderators – the people who are creating it – don't necessarily have the time or know how to moderate it and keep it free of spam and other things. … We stepped in and just 295 helped them get up to speed in a short amount of time with some of the tools and things that we need to moderate a bigger subreddit.” Figure 21. A screenshot of the reddit front page on October 28, 2012, showing the /r/sandy advertisement displayed in the right column. 95 Based on the advertisement, the subreddit gained a significant amount of viewers and subscribers over the course of the next week (see Figure 22 and Figure 23 below). 95 https://web.archive.org/web/20121029185119/http://www.reddit.com/ 296 Figure 22. Estimated number of subscribers at a given second in /r/sandy. Figure 23. Estimated number of simultaneous viewers at a given second in /r/sandy. As the network-wide community embraced live threads more often during developing events, admins looked to these moments as opportunities to provide greater visibility to user-driven information aggregation. When I asked a former administrator about users’ problems with gaining visibility (and their own self-posed question of “How do we improve people’s abilities to find [live threads]?”), they briefly described the process that the administration team went through to promote particular links to live threads: 297 I think it’s still a one off thing that’s an administrative decision. But we put them on the front page sometimes. Not exactly sure how that's being decided now, but we would just put it up there while we could tell when a lot of people were trying to find out something about an event. And kind of look at the quality of the live thread, and just felt if it was something a lot of people were interested in – there's this big news story or like a big event, like the Super Bowl – the quality was okay, we had put that up. In speaking with another admin, they explained how the team doesn’t “want to sticky just any thread,” and lately – due to very political topics that have come up (like the refugee crisis in Europe), they are particularly careful about evaluating who is updating in a particular live thread, what exactly they are posting, and how that might change over time and more people are added. For example, they mentioned how the team looked at a few live threads that users created within different subreddits, and they chose one with moderators from /r/Europe that they recognized and knew they could trust with not posting biased information. They explained that there was no internal policy about what live threads were chosen and ultimately stickied to the front page, but they definitely took these reputational and trustworthy factors into consideration. Of course, one complication that comes with making a decision to sticky a link to a live thread is which link to choose. It is not common for more than one live thread to be created for a particular event, especially if it is an expected event (like an awards ceremony). However, for unexpected crises, the likelihood of simultaneous live threads – and especially multiple live threads created for the event for different subreddit audiences – increases. During and after the 2015 Paris attacks, multiple live threads were created: three threads dominated in different subreddits (/r/Europe, 96 /r/worldnews, 97 and a generic one in /r/live 98 ). When observing the 96 https://www.reddit.com/live/vwwmdb26t78v 97 https://www.reddit.com/live/vwwnkuplwr9y 98 https://www.reddit.com/live/vwwnkuplwr9y 298 reaction to the attacks, I happened to reach out to the creator of the third live thread, and I was invited to participate in adding information (Figure 24). Figure 24. Automated invitation to join the live thread as a contributor, sent over private message to the author. Founding multiple live threads is not inherently detrimental, but it does split attention across multiple simultaneous spaces and duplicates the work of volunteers. In the case of Paris, moderators from the /r/Europe live thread talked directly with reddit admins; the administrators identified a trustworthy team in this live thread, and they reached out to other moderators and users helping in other live threads in an attempt to consolidate the efforts into one space. HJonGoldrake was active as a moderator during the live threads, and he explained that it wasn’t a problem for them: “[Multiple live threads] wasn't a problem for us… the threads don't conflict with each other. They don't steal space or any kind of resource from each other, so it's not a problem. It was mostly to avoid duplication of effort and provide the users the best live feed, because that's what a live thread is: it's a feed of information.” Still, the ideal situation would be to synthesize efforts to do the best work possible: “Having two separate ones with the same objective doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if they had a different angle – one was concentrating on this second’s news and another [for] analysis or commentary or something else – but this wasn't the case. There were identical live threads.” The decision to converge around one primary live thread, however, was not a decision in which moderators were included: The admins decided I think (but I don't know because they didn't tell us, and to be honest we didn't ask) to stick ours at the top of reddit and ask the others to join ours. I think they 299 did it [because] ours had more viewers, but I don't know. It doesn't cause any particular problems, it was just kind of a duplication of effort that could be and was solved. In talking with an administrator who actively worked on recruiting other users and moderators to the /r/Europe live thread, he said that they reached out to the /r/Europe moderators to first ask if they were OK with adding a link to the front page (knowing the extra attention it would bring; this is, according to the admin, a common approach before stickying live threads). He then sent messages to dozens of other users to help increase the capacity of contributors to the live thread (for instance, to the author in Figure 25). Figure 25. Invitation to join the /r/Europe live thread created by a reddit administrator, sent over private message to the author. Participants’ Reactions to Stickying A few users also mentioned their experiences with having posted stickied by moderators and administrators. They tended to express worry about potential lack of visibility for posts, but overall they were energized by the immediate help to their information aggregation work brought about by stickying. For instance, mrgandw explained how the act of having a post promoted via the sticky feature was rather unexpected: The mods were very supportive. … Without me even asking, I think the third or fourth day that I was doing the updates, they stickied the thread at the top of /r/news. I think you've seen [that] they put up little banners all over /r/news like “For the latest updates, click here on this banner” and that sort of thing. They were promoting it, definitely. I didn't expect it. I was pretty stoked when they were doing that because I was like, “Wow. This is really important for a lot of people.” 300 Once moderators included the first post, mrgandw actively synchronized with the moderation team to continue promoting the MH370 threads: I would message them every time we put up a new thread, and they would have it stickied within 15-20 minutes. They were really on top of it. Then they were also really proactive about updating those banners to make sure that they had links to the latest timeline and so forth. Their involvement, it wasn't a lot, but what little they did was super helpful for a lot of people. Another contributor, ctaggie, recounted that the administrators reached out to him, offering to promote his updates, and he realized the immediate significance that the attention would bring to his volunteer work: “[A]t one point – I don't remember exactly what time it was at – I got a message from the reddit admins asking me if it would be okay if they stickied the live thread to the front page of reddit. … I told them it was fine, go ahead and do it, but I realized the stakes had just gotten a lot higher.” The significant increase in perceived audience meant that he started to pay greater attention to the work he was doing: “Any information that I posted would go out to a lot more people and would affect a lot more people. I started being a lot more thorough and a lot more careful with what I was posting. I started making sure, like checking my posts twice before actually putting them up to make sure that it wasn't anything that I would regret posting later.” Megathreads Other methods of attempting to drive attention to specific information have emerged on reddit in the past few years. One of these is the concept of a megathread, which grew out of the stickied post feature. In relation to the moderator goal of providing balance within a subreddit and not having every single top-voted post be about a developing event, moderators have attempted to collect discussion about a particular news event within one thread, which users colloquially refer to as a “megathread.” 301 Megathreads allow the community to come together around particular events, but they also help prevent the splintering of conversations across multiple posts (some of which moderators might ultimately delete during clean up tasks). For example, in his moderator role, SlyRatchet explained the decision process around generating megathreads in discussions with his team: [The benefit of megathreads] is an ongoing debate within our own mod team. I usually come out very much in favor of megathreads in some form. My argument usually follows that ... Say you've got the Paris attacks. Let's say that the first article that comes up is not that there are several attacks going on in Paris right now, but instead that the Stade de Paris has been bombed/hand an attempt to be bombed. Then, you have a separate story that a number of drinking establishments have been shot up. Then, a third story saying the Bataclan, there was a hostage situation there. … A megathread would have been useful because then, it says, “Yo, everyone. Why don't we talk about the way these are interrelated. Talk about something broad that there may be no specific news story for.” He reasoned that megathreads provide a benefit particularly for larger events that appear to have a longer lifespan of attention, because it will help focus the discussion: “This becomes very important when you're dealing with big events that happen over a long period of time. If you don't give people the opportunity to have a broader discussion, they just won't. They will focus on the minute details forever, at least with Reddit. This is why we make the effort to do mega- threads.” However, with megathreads, expectation that moderators would remove posts in order to consolidate information became a conflict for contributors, because they held apprehensions that anything they posted would immediately be removed and lose their audience. Raz, a contributor from Romania, explained that he did not want to create a new post because another user had already updated, and having too many posts meant that moderators would likely step in: I already saw there was another post opened up by someone else. A lot of people open new posts, and a mod just comes in and puts them all in one spot or deletes a bunch of them. “This is the main post, just put everything in here.” Have information that is posted in one and the other one, and it kind of gets confusing for anyone who is trying to follow 302 up what's going on. That's why I didn't want to open up a new post. Just put everything in one: that way if people want to see it, they can just browse the first guy that starts it and updates it, and then just go down a little more you could see mine. Small Updates Matter: Tags, Flair, & Filters Finally, moderators were able to make additional small tweaks in response to the platform’s design limitations to provide better interaction with information that gets updated over time. These emergent practices provided the ability to contextualize ongoing events for members of communities that would jump in and out quickly without much time to immerse themselves in the aggregated information for lengthy periods of time. When a post is created, titles – the headlines of a contribution – are the first interaction that readers have with any contribution (be it URL or text) based on reddit’s design. However, while hundreds of edits might be added to a comment update or within a live thread, titles cannot be edited (to prevent abuse of the system). Placing inaccurate information in titles therefore leads to friction, both with the original contributor but also with readers. For example, shankee posted about a “blast” in a Bucharest nightclub. He explained how the title misrepresented the event, because some claimed it was a blast early before verification, and later on it was revealed that there was only a fire (still dangerous, but possibly caused by pyrotechnics). He explained the immediate reaction that the misinformation provoked about the incorrect title: The main problem is that it's “wounded in blast at Bucharest nightclub.” The fact that you actually can't edit the title, as far as I know (they haven't updated it yet or are not even planning on updating it). People just came in with comments, that I get directly to my phone. That was a lot of comments. There were a lot about just telling me that my title is wrong. In our conversation, his frustration was clear: There is literally nothing I can do about it… The only thing I can do is just edit it in that first top [comment] that I had with the edits. Because they were also updates, basically the first thing in that post was that it was a fire instead of a blast. I mean there really isn't anything we can do about it. I think the top [comment] at the moment on that thread… is 303 a comment from someone who has updated it himself. He starts with, “Might want to edit it that title to say ‘Night Club Fire Blast’ instead of ‘blast.’” Yeah, I know, but I can't do anything about that. That's a bit frustrating, but nothing you can do. In his explanation, he mentioned another contributor who also provided informational updates in a comment (which was also heavily upvoted). In another interview, the commenter – Raz – told me that he didn’t want to create an entirely new post, because this one already had a lot of attention since it was highly upvoted, so he put the correction at the very top of his comment: I didn't want to open a new post, because this one was already up there, so I just said, since you can't edit titles on reddit, I just put it in a comment that it was a “night club fire blast.” Because when you see “blast,” you think bomb; “blast” is usually some sort of explosive device. Whereas this was just a straight up spontaneous fire. … If you don't want to go into details you might think it was an explosion of some sort, but then you go to the article and see, “No, just an unfortunate accident.” While ordinary user accounts cannot do much in these situations besides attempting ways to respond within the constraints of the platform, moderators do have the ability to add additional metadata (tags, also known as flair) that appear next to the titles. For instance, in the case of the Bucharest fire above, a moderator eventually added the tag “Pyrotechnics may have caused fire” (see Figure 26 below), clarifying the situation for future readers. Figure 26. Moderators added a flair tag to the left side of the title in order to correct the information that could not be edited in the title. Moderators will occasionally use this feature to update continually throughout an event. For instance, moderators in /r/TropicalWeather have used flair to update the status of storms and hurricanes as they pass through a region; as one of the mods, Anthony, explained: “[W]e have a 304 unified way of posting threads. We have a format so it makes it easier for people to keep it live updated. We just say to post the name rather than ‘Tropical Storm’ Blank. … Then we have a flair that can be updated. It could be tropical storm, hurricane, hurricane category 1-2-3-4, etc.” In the same subreddit, the moderators could also flair approved users with news-related expertise: [T]heir names are flared. Whenever they post something in the comments, people see “approved meteorologist” by their names. They give what they say a little bit more weight. As they should: they're approved meteorologists posting in a hurricane thread. Some of them are with the NWS and the government. It's good people to have. Their information is usually extremely valuable. On occasion, though, moderators are not entirely transparent about the process with their communities. EpicBadass encountered a situation where a flair tag suddenly appeared on his submission’s title. “I don't [know how the piece of flair came about]. I was just updating… Then at some point that tag just appeared.” While the post wasn’t edited or deleted by a moderator, the participant told me that – while the appearance of the tag that read “Don’t post personal info” fit in with the rules of the subreddit – a moderator never contacted him to explain: “I never even got a notification or saw it.” Similarly, for another contributor who updated about a hostage situation in Paris in January 2015, a little over a week after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the AutoModerator bot in the /r/worldnews subreddit mislabeled the post with a flair that linked it back to the tragedy based on related keywords in the title, even though it was an unrelated event. One comment on the post read, “Why The Fuck is this tagged as Charlie Hebdo. Reddit is not a fuckin tabloid,” 99 after which a few other users explained the automatic tagging system. The takeaway, of course, is summarized in how another commenter reacted: “it's incredibly misleading for anyone who just 99 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2smesp/at_least_3_people_taken_hostage_at_post_office/ 305 glances at the headline in their feed.” Lol_Naie1 explained his frustration: “It’s always a problem because from the beginning, it’s always difficult. It makes things more difficult because you have to correct it. … [I]f something wrong appeared on the news at one point, then some people will be forever misled, because they don’t check the news the day after when they correct it.” Conclusion In this chapter, I used the lens of visibility – both applied and dismissed – to show issues of political power in peer information production on reddit. The code of a platform, whether it designs technical infrastructure or social roles, significantly shapes and mediates what participants can and cannot do. And, as we saw above, participants in privileged roles were able to change expectations and norms (as well as provide frustration and surprises) for contributors attempting to provide updates during developing events. In general, those with more power were able to disrupt the aggregation practices of those with less. One question that remains is whether or not ordinary participants have the ability to counteract the powerful entities that structure their work. As we saw, it is unlikely that non- administrators could change the core design of the site. Alternatively, non-moderators would have to be identified by other moderators as helpful and valuable before being added to a moderation team. Therefore, issues like deletion and unexpected benefits like stickying notably affect gatekeeping practices on reddit. But members of the reddit community have attempted to respond to power through collective action. Throughout these chapters, I have provided details about various user-led innovations like AutoModerator or /r/Toolbox. Some users have taken it upon themselves to create systems that speak back to the system, by tracking information and creating infrastructure to provide visibility into information dynamics and processes. For example, tech-savvy participants created the /r/undelete subreddit to track moderator deletions of 306 submissions that reached /r/all (an ordered listing of the top-voted contributions across every single subreddit in reddit’s network). While the participants of /r/undelete frequently identify these moderator actions as conspiracies or behaviors with hidden agendas, the fact remains that the existence of /r/undelete shows how participants in the general community can advocate for their own interests in opposition to the interests of moderators or administrators. Impacting the design of the site is more difficult, but inventions like the Reddit Enhancement Suite 100 – which provides a browser-based second layer to reddit’s design that helps track submissions, users, etc. – again allow participants to work around the limitations built into reddit’s systems. 100 http://www.redditenhancementsuite.com/ 307 Ch. 8: Conclusion In the ever-evolving information ecosystems of the internet, people continue to engage with news in unique and unexpected ways. As journalists experiment with involving citizens in their reporting of events, people continue to come together and collaborate on the collection and circulation of information beyond journalistic control. Information aggregation seems to be a direct response not in doubt of the quality of contemporary journalism but instead in acknowledgement of the expansiveness of it, where audiences have to sort through multitudes of information to understand stories from multiple perspectives. Aggregation and filtering is, by definition, a way that people try to take control of the vast information landscape presented to them by multitudes of news and media organizations. The decisions that individuals and groups make regarding what information is promoted or removed act as new forms of gatekeeping. However, these practices in certain situations reflect many shared values and actions common to journalistic work. Summary of Findings In this dissertation, I examined peer information aggregation as a practice of information collection, evaluation, and broadcast in reaction to developing events by asking the question, How do people aggregate information in response to developing events, and how are these practices mediated by network gatekeeping in new media platforms? Network gatekeeping framed these practices to highlight how collaborative online platforms support peer information aggregation as a set of alternative or extended behaviors for gatekeeping processes, provide new methods for information production, shift the relationship between gatekeepers and gated in collaborative aggregation tasks, and expose the limitations of aggregation in relation to the political power enacted through technological design. 308 Who Participates in Peer Information Aggregation In Chapter 4, in response to the research question, “Who are the participants that do peer information aggregation work, and what are their motivations, prior experience, and values?,” I showed how motivations, experiences, and values build up to shape aggregation practices in relation to reddit as an alternative space for responding to developing events. These motivations draw strongly from reddit as a perceived alternative space to other social media platforms and news organizations, based on perceived dimensions such as speed and breadth of perspectives. While participants did not necessarily have journalistic experience, the values of participants aligned strongly with assumptions about journalistic norms (such as objectivity and the quest for factual information), and they drew from prior experiences with information aggregation and news reporting on reddit to inform their own work. While participants were motivated by their own orientations to particular ways of consuming news (such as access to specific information sources), one of the strongest factors motivating participants’ involvement was individual timing in relation to others’ participation within the platform. The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation In Chapter 5, in response to the research question, “What are the practices of peer information aggregation, and how do they make decisions to conduct this type of high-tempo news work?,” I explained the mental and social processes that formulate information production during aggregation. I showed that, while aggregation generally manifests in similar formats, the lack of standardization results in varying methods of information collecting and broadcasting. Further, in conducting the significant and crucial practices of sourcing and verification, participants in particular drew on the affordances of reddit, like its large collective network, to elicit feedback (or in some cases, merely encountered it), which aided these aggregating participants indirectly 309 in doing their work. However, what was clear was the strong dependence on traditional, reputable sources of information, namely mainstream media organizations and professional journalists. While other scholars – like Osborne & Dredze (2014) – have found that social media platforms continue to lag behind the direct reporting of newswire services, there remains the perception that social media platforms continue to be faster or at least present audiences with a wider array of perspectives across the multiple sources available. How People Collaboration in Peer Information Aggregation Then, in Chapter 6, in response to the research question, “How do participants collaborate and coordinate during peer information aggregation?,” I illustrated the relationships between collaborators who chose to work together in response to ongoing events. Looking at individual collaborations up to larger collective collaborations in live threads and moderator groups, I found that collaboration produced both benefits and questionable results in the goal toward creating successful information aggregation attempts. Larger groups tended to duplicate efforts because they had to rely mostly on implicit coordination, compared to smaller or individual collaborations. Further, moderators who had pre-established communication channels and experience working together found ways to explicitly communicate and achieve stronger outcomes. That said, participants within these larger groups commonly made arbitrary decisions (who to collaborate with) that greatly affected the trajectory of aggregation efforts. How Design Shapes Peer Information Aggregation Finally, in Chapter 7, in response to the research question, “What conflicts arise between human and technological actors in peer information aggregation?,” I discussed the importance of design and its potential impact on aggregation work, particularly around the issue of information visibility. Specifically, I examined how a variety of human and technical actors with control 310 – namely the technological structure of a platform and the privileged social roles defined by code – introduce significant conflicts into aggregation work, through ranking, deletion, and manual promotion. The conflicts that occur between ordinary users and those with privileges (moderators and administrators) highlighted how the design of the platform could introduce complications into the potential for aggregation contributors to be strong gatekeepers of information. Instead, the lack of agency against ranking algorithms and privileged user roles led to confusion and conflicts, both for individual contributions as well as across the larger news consuming community. Peer Information Aggregation & Network Gatekeeping By combining the evidence presented in the preceding four analysis chapters, this dissertation presents a larger illustration of the social, informational, and structural patterns of behaviors that make up “peer information aggregation.” Peer information aggregation represents one version of what Thorson & Wells (2015) called “curated flows,” extending the concept of the two-step model of communication Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955) into a multi-dimensional space involving digital actors and varying directional information channels (see Figure 27 below; Figure 28 demonstrates the dynamics of network gatekeeping that occur within each step of the peer information aggregation framework). The important extension brought about by the curated flows concept is its embrace of algorithmic and crowd-driven influences. In some ways, these new actors present in curated flows may represent or replace the notion of opinion leaders, which were traditionally assumed to impact individuals’ opinions of mass media messages and which now may impact these presumptions of reputed informativeness through the valorization of code (ranking algorithms that choose the best information automatically) and groupthink (large collectives that summarize aggregated opinions). 311 Figure 27. The process of peer information aggregation. Information from journalists, experts, and user- generated content and news from media organizations are put through a process of gatekeeping, where algorithms, governing moderators/administrators, and crowds provide feedback and visibility to particular information. Aggregation participants draw from timing, values, and experience when choosing, sourcing, and verifying information, all of which is facilitated through the design of the platform and the 1-on-1 and group collaborations over the course of an ongoing event. Figure 28. “Illustration of network gatekeeping” (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008, 1508). 312 The question that frames the importance of peer information aggregation to network gatekeeping theories is that posed by Thorson & Wells (2015): “Which curation processes are most significant in citizens’ media experiences?” (10). When we consider the lived experiences of news consumers, many of them receive their daily information from designed, digital communication channels, and therefore understanding the social and infrastructural dynamics underlying the information circulation processes within these systems is of vital importance. What peer information aggregation illuminates though is a multidimensional system of temporary and improvised interactions between motivated contributors, traditional mainstream media entities, and opaque aggregating processes via crowds, algorithms, and online governance. multiple acts of curation operate simultaneously or in series within an individual’s information experience, intersecting and overlapping (12). This dissertation then contributes to a greater understanding and conceptualization of network gatekeeping theory by presenting the case study of a social news site and participants practices of information aggregation in response to developing news events. Barzilai-Nahon (2008) claims that “[g]atekeeping theory holds the key to a more useful, in-depth, and comprehensive theory of information control in society” (1507). However, few studies have systematically examined the levels of analysis present in the theory of network gatekeeping. In response, I illustrate the complications of this theory of information flow to show how peer information aggregators represent an evolving approach to collaborative information production and circulation, where these practices diverge from and yet rely on the efforts of journalists and media organizations. Even though some decisions appear to be arbitrary, the reliance on mainstream media reporting suggests that initial stages of widespread information control may not yet lie in the hands of “citizen journalists,” though it is clear that aggregation participants and 313 their viewers have the ability to bring prominence and attention to sources they find trustworthy and reliable. Using the case study of reddit, I also illustrate how the platform itself plays a significant role in shaping both the attitudes toward and the practices of information control. Unlike systems like Twitter, reddit’s focus on crowd participation and ranking algorithms sets up an ecosystem where specific sets of expectations emerge from participants’ interactions with very particular design choices. As reddit continues to evolve, administrators will design new features and tools to provide better support for news-related practices (for instance, reddit recently launched a beta version of email alerts for comments and private messages, which could amplify the ways in which aggregation participants keep track of feedback 101 ). However, theoretical approaches to understanding information flows and gatekeeping practices should continue to map these evolving system designs to emergent user behaviors, to see how and if they ultimately affect participants’ engagement with news. Further, reddit exists as one of the few cases where network gatekeeping salience exists across all four dimensions (alternatives, information production, relationships, and political power). Unlike other studies that examine network gatekeeping, this dissertation provides some examples of how these dimensions interact with each other. For instance, I show how conflicting situations between relationships and power lead to moderators working with users and controlling what they post. Contrastingly, I identify some beneficial interactions, such as where information production intersects with alternatives, illustrating how perceptions of reddit as a community platform in opposition to mainstream organizations’ news reports shapes individual 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/4il6mv/beta_update_20160509_receive_notifications_as/ 314 information production to focus on triangulating and combining multiple types of information and news sources for audiences to evaluate evolving stories en masse. Finally, peer information aggregation highlights the evolving roles of gatekeepers and gated in the new media landscape. The momentary, impromptu, and unstructured decisions of people who aggregate information vary the kinds of breaking news information that gain visibility and are presented to potentially millions of viewers. These practices in some ways mirror the institutional and occupational values and behaviors of journalists, whereas in other ways they diverge (such as in cases where contributors rely on the wider network for feedback). Perhaps most importantly, the dissertation highlights that one of the core tenets of network gatekeeping theory – the identification of gated and gatekeeper roles – may be too dichotomous to fully encapsulate the fluctuating and evolving roles that participants make when aggregating information during developing events. Participants act as gated when consuming news articles to share in reddit submissions, and they control what kinds of information to share with audiences. These audiences can act as feedback mechanisms to those aggregating users. Moderators may help promote or delete particular types of information against the will of aggregation participants, or they may work in cohort to collaborate on ad-hoc reporting. The question remains if network gatekeeping theory may continue to be useful as the roles of gatekeeper and gated fall apart when participants exhibit both simultaneously. Further, the role of technological design as a gatekeeping actor should be future more prominently in future research, especially as concerns about algorithmic filtering in information-critical situations (e.g., political conversations on Facebook during an election cycle 102 ) continue to manifest. 102 http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 315 Limitations and Future Research Although this dissertation develops and presents a detailed understanding of peer information aggregation in reaction to breaking news events, there remain some limitations to the project’s scope and methodology. First, the project primarily relied on ethnographic interviews, supported by participant observation and trace data analysis. The analysis was limited to people who self- selected to participate in interviews, so it is possible that those who did not want to talk had different approaches to, perspectives on, or even success at peer information aggregation. Also, while there was ample opportunity to conduct quantitative analyses, the need to scale down was always prescient. Still, a richer analysis of the evolution of peer information aggregation and network gatekeeping practices on reddit might reveal further shifts in how people approach issues of information surges in developing events. I plan to conduct future research that draws more strongly from mixed methods, particularly quantitative and computational approaches. Second, the scope of cases selected for study revolved around active participation in peer information aggregation. It was difficult to find instances where people expressed interest in participating but ultimately did not. Further, the selected cases tended to revolve around larger efforts of aggregation (i.e., at least a handful of updates). In every case, multiple individuals contributed singular pieces of information or links to sources. While these behaviors were common, they were not a particular focus of the aggregation processes discussed here. Also, while I examined the specific case of an event-related subreddit in a former project (Leavitt & Clark, 2014), I only briefly discuss the role of specific subreddits in this dissertation (and mostly from the perspective of moderators). Future research might look at the impact of different teams and their behaviors within news- and event-related subreddits. 316 Third, it is important to recognize my own biases as a researcher. As a white American male in my late-twenties who speaks English, I represent a large part of the perceived and actual demographics of reddit. I have actively participated on the platform for almost five years, and my views are shaped by my personal experiences on the site. Further, I am not, nor have I been, a journalist or worked in news reporting; I also rarely consume news on television, radio, or other means that are more common to many people’s daily experiences. These biases may have shaped the questions I asked and the signals I looked for during the course of the project. Finally, while I cover a wide range of cases across numerous events, the social and technological contexts revolve primarily around one field site, reddit.com. Because of the particular designs of this platform and the subcultural norms of the community, the practices of information aggregation on reddit may differ from those in other sociotechnical systems given other collectives of people. As with any research, generalizability remains a concern; here, the range of events and types of aggregation provide a robust overview of the practices, but in another platform, the impact of design might affect issues such as visibility in drastically different ways. A comparative analysis of other platforms would help extend and improve theories of network gatekeeping and aggregation, particularly as the news practices continue to evolve in the near future. Future research should also focus on the impact of peer information aggregation on news audiences. One of the most uncertain questions that I encountered in interviews with aggregation contributors was whether or not their work ultimately mattered. Some participants were convinced that they had affected strangers (for instance, as the messages received by mrgandw in the case of MH370 suggest); for others, the significance was questionable and uncertain. As one concerned European participant told me: 317 If you have time to spare to be on reddit, I don't think you have much real issues in your life. That's not true for everyone, but for a strong majority, I think that's true. … The crash of a plane is not going to change much for them. At the same time, maybe some person using reddit in Mali who only had that because, for whatever reason… could get information that way… I don't really think as much, but maybe. Hundreds of projects have examined the impact of news organizations opinion leaders on audiences through models of framing and media exposure (Thorson & Wells, 2015), and as the opinion leaders and information gatekeepers shift from journalists to ordinary citizens working together on popularized online platforms, the impact of these behaviors may begin to shape the lived experiences of many more people around the world. Design Implications In the tradition of current HCI research, I also wish to mention the implications that this research has for the design of sociotechnical systems. Though Dourish (2006) presents a case for moving beyond design implications as a method of research presentation, particularly as theory has been marginalized in favor of using ethnography as a “toolbox of methods” (543), the findings of this dissertation reveal various issues that people encounter on a day-to-day basis that might improve a system for peer information aggregation in future crises. First, it is clear that affordances for coordination remain key to successful collaborative aggregation work. As I demonstrated in Chapters 5 and 6, many participants relied on internal and external communication channels to coordinate their collection of information and sources as well as networked verification. Unlike Wikipedia, which houses a collaborative discussion space for every encyclopedia entry (the “talk” page), social media platforms tend to not offer meta- communicative spaces for the coordination of activities that result in the final peer-produced artifacts (e.g., tweets, reddit comments, etc.). Ample time for peer information aggregation participants was spend on the coordination of multiple contributors around multiple information 318 flows (whether original sources or mainstream media organization’s channels). In the case of reddit, it became clear that the live thread format could use additional testing and feature development. The lack of concerted effort toward implementing explicit communication features has meant that participants need to coordinate external to the system and rely primarily on implicit coordination, resulting in frequently occurring duplications, error correction, and additional moderation. Additional analysis of a chat function could potentially alleviate these issues. Second, information visibility remains a primary concern in systems where information surges dominate reactions to developing events. In the face of algorithmically-determined systems like Facebook, platforms such as Twitter have stuck to their guns when making assumptions about the best ways for people to consume information (i.e., for Twitter, the prolonged emphasis on the importance of the reverse chronological tweet timeline). In the case of Twitter, so-called “trending topics” have attempted to alleviate the issues of information visibility, calling attention to the manifestation of information surges, relying on collective efforts to immediately surface the most relevant information (i.e., through retweets). In the case of social media platforms that rely on voting (i.e., social news sites), the long crawl to vote on every piece of content that passes through the system results in delayed production of visibility around crucial information, particular in times of crisis. Considering the increasing importance of social media platforms in the circulation of critical event-based information, platforms may need to consider designing interventions to their own systems to produce better ways of surfacing information to ensure it does not remain invisible. In the case of reddit, the difficulty in providing visibility to live threads identified in Chapter 7 suggests that additional features to help both moderators and live thread creators quickly create these threads in a manner where the 319 contributions can easily be upvoted would relieve unnecessary coordination around the initial promotional stage, where users need to coordinate with each other to create a live thread, share it to interested parties, and then have people visit the link. Currently, the live thread only posts automatically to /r/live, which does little to bring attention in subreddits of interest (like /r/news, /r/worldnews, and specific local subreddits). Further, tweaking the core ranking algorithms that promote the most basic ordered content may alleviate some of the problems around “default” uses of the system (i.e., many people continue to rely on the “hot” algorithm for their timely information needs). Finally, the role of online governance in the dynamics of gatekeeping remains a primary concern for systems designers. Even with designed tools for make distributed collaboration easier and more accessible, research has shown that distributed social systems still trend toward hierarchical structures (e.g., that wikis have become more oligarphic over time; A. Shaw & Hill, 2014). In the case of hierarchically-determined systems, the amount of power provided to certain user roles results in strong concerns about decisions made contrary to the whims and fancies of the wider collective of participants (and on the opposite end, transparency about these privileged users’ actions and related processes taken within the system). In constructing systems, designers should be cognizant about the social implications of the privileges designed into particular types of user accounts. And further, when administrators become so involved in the inner workings of the system (as was the case of reddit for a fair number of breaking news events covered in this dissertation), it is important to provide enough transparency about these manual processes so that participants can integrate such processes into their own participatory work. In the case of reddit, administrators and subreddit moderators generally provide no methods by which ordinary participants might take on more responsibility (without becoming moderators themselves), and 320 the networked subreddit system relies on the determination of moderators to uphold the community rules, platform regulations, and emergent social norms of each community to the extent that participants understand what is going on (and can identify the precise moments that things go awry). Further, with the lack of standardized practices amongst aggregation participants, administrators should consider providing avenues for people to work together to develop these standards in order to quickly and appropriately aggregate information and provide a public good service to the variety of audiences that frequent reddit’s front page every day (without putting much of the responsibility on moderators to organize those efforts when emergent contributors do not coordinate well enough to be successful). Final Words During the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings, technology journalist Mathew Ingram tweeted a message about reddit being the possible materialization of the ideals and goals of the WikiNews project (Bruns, 2006; Hill, 2007): Figure 29. Tweet from Mathew Ingram in response to the reddit information aggregation efforts around the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings. 103 103 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/226338798076846080 321 Interestingly, while Ingram’s reaction recognizes the practices of information aggregation that integ3r and others had put effort into over the course of a dozen long threads, his comparison to WikiNews seems to focus on the end result rather than the actual complicated process. While Wikipedia (and the failed WikiNews) produce lasting knowledge artifacts, the crux of the success behind the wiki model lies in the discussions, debates, and decisions that occur behind the scenes. Similarly, the discussions, debates, and decisions that occur on reddit lead to fascinating information artifacts about developing events, but it is important to highlight how those conversations and choices oscillate over time. Network gatekeeping provides a lens to look at how people work together to produce breaking news information aggregation on reddit, and these cases also illuminate the need to look further at collaborative efforts at the intersections of information versus news and peer production versus journalism. Newly design platforms will overtake the systems currently in vogue, and scholars, engineers, designers, and journalists will need to understand the implications that these new platforms will have on the circulation of critical news information as participants adopt the practices from social systems like reddit into the newly designed spaces of the future. Addendum (June 20, 2016) With all research, but especially those directly linked to evolving, global news events, there will always be additional cases to study. After the defense of the dissertation, on June 12, 2016, a single gunman entered Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and shot into the crowd, killing 49 people and injuring 53 others. As with all of the crises and tragedies examined thus far, the reaction to the Orlando shootings hit a nerve in the reddit community due to the response of moderators in removing the visibility of particular pieces of crucial information. 322 Figure 30. An image of a deleted comment circulated in response to moderators’ deletions of submissions to /r/news. 104 Because of these deletions and removals in the /r/news subreddit, other communities like /r/AskReddit and especially /r/the_donald (a subreddit dedicated to Donald Trump, which had been gaming the /r/all ranking algorithm in prior months) stepped in to provide visibility to information about the attacks. The mistakes of moderators and the response of the community are not novel: we have seen in this dissertation that similar issues have arisen in the past (e.g., after the Boston Marathon bombing). Perhaps the current scale and popularity of reddit – and people’s dependence on the site for news and information – amplified the criticism (and visibility to that criticism, as communities like /r/undelete collaborated on a response to demand transparency from community leaders). However, one notable development is that the reaction of community members to moderators’ actions spurred the reddit administration team to publicly respond in an official 104 http://i.imgur.com/OGaPNij.png 323 announcement. 105 Steve Huffman (the CEO of reddit) provided details about changes to be made in the future: In the wake of this weekend, we will be making a handful of technology and process changes: • Live threads are the best place for news to break and for the community to stay updated on the events. We are working to make this more timely, evident, and organized. • We’re introducing a change to Sticky Posts: They’ll now be called Announcement Posts, which better captures their intended purpose; they will only be able to be created by moderators; and they must be text posts. Votes will continue to count. We are making this change to prevent the use of Sticky Posts to organize bad behavior. • We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation. • We are nearly fully staffed on our Community team, and will continue increasing support for moderator teams of major communities. Importantly, he called out the need for the team’s engineers and designers to reconsider the design of the system to address issues of visibility in the case of situations where audiences need immediate and up-to-date information. In particular, he made one bold claim: “[W]e have a duty to provide access to timely information during a crisis.” This statement marks a shift in the direction of reddit’s purpose as an information hub; as the former administrator claimed, reddit was never supposed to be for breaking news, but as people have adapted it for various purposes (though aggregation threads especially, illustrated in this dissertation), those who operate the platform begin to recognize that they need to address how participants enable their platforms for distinct uses. 105 https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4ny59k/lets_talk_about_orlando/ 324 Bibliography Acar, A., & Muraki, Y. (2011). Twitter for crisis communication: lessons learned from Japan’s tsunami disaster. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 7(3), 392–402. Adler, B. T., de Alfaro, L., Pye, I., & Raman, V. (2008). Measuring author contributions to the Wikipedia (p. 1). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/1822258.1822279 Agarwal, S. D., & Barthel, M. L. (2013). The friendly barbarians: Professional norms and work routines of online journalists in the United States. Journalism, 1464884913511565. Aitamurto, T. (2015). Crowdsourcing as a Knowledge-Search Method in Digital Journalism: Ruptured ideals and blended responsibility. Digital Journalism, 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1034807 Ananny, M. (2015). Toward an Ethics of Algorithms: Convening, Observation, Probability, and Timeliness. Science, Technology & Human Values. http://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915606523 Ananny, M., & Crawford, K. (2015). A Liminal Press: Situating news app designers within a field of networked news production. Digital Journalism, 3(2), 192–208. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.922322 Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, C. W. (2013a). Rebuilding the news: Metropolitan journalism in the digital age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Anderson, C. W. (2013b). What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age. Journalism, 1464884913492460. 325 Anthony, D., Smith, S. W., & Williamson, T. (2005). Explaining quality in internet collective goods: Zealots and good samaritans in the case of wikipedia. Hanover: Dartmouth College. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Denise_Anthony/publication/200772778_Explainin g_Quality_in_Internet_Collective_Goods_Zealots_and_Good_Samaritans_in_the_Case_ of_Wikipedia/links/02e7e52120de6cebb2000000.pdf Arif, A., Shanahan, K., Chou, F.-J., Dosouto, Y., Starbird, K., & Spiro, E. S. (2016). How Information Snowballs: Exploring the Role of Exposure in Online Rumor Propagation. Proceedings of CSCW. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emma_Spiro/publication/282852546_How_Informat ion_Snowballs_Exploring_the_Role_of_Exposure_in_Online_Rumor_Propagation/links/ 561ea18008aecade1accde25.pdf Atton, C., & Wickenden, E. (2005). Sourcing Routines and Representation in Alternative Journalism: a case study approach. Journalism Studies, 6(3), 347–359. http://doi.org/10.1080/14616700500132008 Bakker, P. (2014). Mr. Gates Returns: Curation, community management and other new roles for journalists. Journalism Studies, 15(5), 596–606. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.901783 Bandari, R., Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2012). The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity. In ICWSM (pp. 26–33). Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/download/4646%26lt%3B/ 4963 326 Barnhurst, K. G., & Mutz, D. (1997). American journalism and the decline in event-centered reporting. Journal of Communication, 47(4), 27–53. Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2008). Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9), 1493–1512. http://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20857 Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2009). Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43(1), 1–79. http://doi.org/10.1002/aris.2009.1440430117 Bass, A. Z. (1969). Redefining the gatekeeper concept: A U.N. radio case study. Journalism Quarterly, 46, 59–72. Beam, M. A. (2014). Automating the News How Personalized News Recommender System Design Choices Impact News Reception. Communication Research, 41(8), 1019–1041. Beaulieu, A. (2004). Mediating ethnography: objectivity and the making of ethnographies of the internet. Social Epistemology, 18(2-3), 139–163. http://doi.org/10.1080/0269172042000249264 Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Benkler, Y., & Nissenbaum, H. (2006). Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue*. Journal of Political Philosophy, 14(4), 394–419. Benkler, Y., Shaw, A., & Hill, B. M. (2015). Peer Production: A Form of Collective Intelligence. In M. Bernstein & T. Malone (Eds.), The Handbook of Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://mako.cc/academic/benkler_shaw_hill- peer_production_ci.pdf 327 Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A., & Walker, S. (2014). Organization in the crowd: peer production in large-scale networked protests. Information, Communication & Society, 17(2), 232– 260. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.870379 Bergstrom, K. (2011). “Don’t feed the troll”: Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit. com. First Monday, 16(8). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3498 Berkowitz, D. (1992). Non-routine news and newswork: Exploring a what-a-story. Journal of Communication, 42(1), 82–94. Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J., & Stohl, C. (2005). Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment. Communication Theory, 15(4), 365–388. Bimber, B., Flanagin, Andrew J., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Boczkowski, P. J., & Mitchelstein, E. (2013). The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., Taylor, T. L., & Marcus, G. E. (2012). Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton University Press. Boorstin, D. (1961). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. boyd, danah m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x 328 Bregman, A., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2003). Radicals of presentation: visibility, relation, and co- presence in persistent conversation. New Media & Society, 5(1), 117–140. Broersma, M., & Graham, T. (2013). TWITTER AS A NEWS SOURCE: How Dutch and British newspapers used tweets in their news coverage, 2007–2011. Journalism Practice, 7(4), 446–464. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.802481 Bro, P., & Wallberg, F. (2015). Gatekeeping in a Digital Era: Principles, practices and technological platforms. Journalism Practice, 9(1), 92–105. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2014.928468 Bruno, N. (2011). Tweet first, verify later. How Real-Time Information Is Changing the Coverage. Retrieved from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Tweet%20first%20,%20verify %20later%20How%20real- time%20information%20is%20changing%20the%20coverage%20of%20worldwide%20c risis%20events.pdf Bruns, A. (2003). Gatewatching, not gatekeeping: Collaborative online news. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources, 107, 31–44. Bruns, A. (2006). Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News? Scan Journal, 3(1). Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4862 Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang Publishing. 329 Bruns, A., & Highfield, T. (2012). Blogs, Twitter, and breaking news: The produsage of citizen journalism. Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, 80(2012), 15–32. Bruns, A., & Highfield, T. (2015). 18. From news blogs to news on Twitter: gatewatching and collaborative news curation. Handbook of Digital Politics, 325. Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society, 14(7), 1164–1180. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 Burawoy, M. (1998). The Extended Case Method. In Ethnography Unbound. Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Burke, M., Marlow, C., & Lento, T. (2009). Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 945–954). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518847 Burrell, J. (2009). The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research. Field Methods, 21(2), 181–199. http://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X08329699 Burrell, J. (2012, May 28). The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data: Small Data People in a Big Data World. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Vol. 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cetina, K. K. (2009). The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World. Symbolic Interaction, 32(1), 61–87. http://doi.org/10.1525/si.2009.32.1.61 330 Chan, A. J. (2002). Collaborative news networks: Distributed editing, collective action, and the construction of online news on Slashdot. org. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/40021 Chew, C., & Eysenbach, G. (2010). Pandemics in the age of Twitter: content analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PloS One, 5(11), e14118. Coddington, M. (2015). Telling Secondhand Stories: News Aggregation and the Production of Journalistic Knowledge (Dissertation). The University of Texas at Austin. Coddington, M., & Holton, A. E. (2014). When the Gates Swing Open: Examining Network Gatekeeping in a Social Media Setting. Mass Communication and Society, 17(2), 236– 257. http://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2013.779717 Cohen, S., Hamilton, J. T., & Turner, F. (2011). Computational journalism. Communications of the ACM, 54(10), 66. http://doi.org/10.1145/2001269.2001288 Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. Cozma, R., & Chen, K.-J. (2013). WHAT’S IN A TWEET?: Foreign correspondents’ use of social media. Journalism Practice, 7(1), 33–46. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.683340 Dailey, D., & Starbird, K. (2014). Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 23(4-6), 445– 481. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9208-z Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1994). Media Events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 331 Diakopoulos, N. (2013). Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes (A Tow/Knight Brief). Tow Center for Digital Journalism: Tow. Retrieved from http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/78524_Tow-Center-Report-WEB-1.pdf Diakopoulos, N. (2015). Algorithmic Accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 398–415. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411 Diakopoulos, N., De Choudhury, M., & Naaman, M. (2012). Finding and assessing social media information sources in the context of journalism. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2451–2460). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208409 Diakopoulos, N., & Zubiaga, A. (2014). Newsworthiness and Network Gatekeeping on Twitter: The Role of Social Deviance. In International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arkaitz_Zubiaga/publication/261026764_Newsworth iness_and_Network_Gatekeeping_on_Twitter_The_Role_of_Social_Deviance/links/0dee c5330792dedc15000000.pdf Diao, Q., Jiang, J., Zhu, F., & Lim, E.-P. (2012). Finding bursty topics from microblogs. In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Long Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 536–544). Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2390599 Dourish, P. (2006). Implications for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 541–550). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1124855 332 Dubois, E., & Ford, H. (2015). Qualitative Political Communication| Trace Interviews: An Actor-Centered Approach. International Journal of Communication, 9, 25. Eliasoph, N., & Lichterman, P. (1999). “We begin with our favorite theory…”: reconstructing the extended case method. Sociological Theory, 17(2), 228–234. Ellison, N. B., & Boyd, D. (2013). Sociality through social network sites. Oxford University Press Oxford. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zXryMw4uVPoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA151& dq=%22dramatically+since+then+.+In+this+chapter+,+we+document+some+of+the%22 +%22between+social+network+sites+and+other+genres.+Meanwhile,%22+%22have+als o+co-evolved+alongside+the+technical+features+and+social%22+&ots=S7wjNB- e8q&sig=Le9V0WiQ_CUuH7wIOlBoNuuV8sM Emerson, R., Fretz, R., & Shaw, L. (1995). Pursuing Members’ Meanings. In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ernste, T. J. (2014). Towards a Networked Gatekeeping Theory: Journalism, News Diffusion, and Democracy in a Networked Media Environment. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA. Retrieved from http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/162639 Eslami, M., Rickman, A., Vaccaro, K., Aleyasen, A., Vuong, A., Karahalios, K., … Sandvig, C. (2015). “I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]”: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds (pp. 153–162). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702556 Freelon, D. (2014). On the Interpretation of Digital Trace Data in Communication and Social Computing Research. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(1), 59–75. http://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2013.875018 333 Friedman, B., & Nissenbaum, H. (1996). Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 14(3), 330–347. Fröhlich, R., Quiring, O., & Engesser, S. (2012). Between idiosyncratic self-interests and professional standards: A contribution to the understanding of participatory journalism in Web 2.0. Results from an online survey in Germany. Journalism, 13(8), 1041–1063. Fulk, J., & Yuan, Y. C. (2013). Location, Motivation, and Social Capitalization via Enterprise Social Networking. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 20–37. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12033 Gallé, M., Renders, J.-M., & Karstens, E. (2013). Who broke the news?: an analysis on first reports of news events. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion (pp. 855–862). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2488066 Gans, H. J. (1980). Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Random House. Garcia, A. C., Standlee, A. I., Bechkoff, J., & Yan Cui. (2009). Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38(1), 52–84. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891241607310839 Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Geiger, R. S., & Ribes, D. (2011). Trace ethnography: Following coordination through documentary practices. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1–10). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5718606 334 Gilbert, E. (2013). Widespread underprovision on reddit. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 803–808). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441866 Gil de Zuniga, H., Lewis, S. C., Willard, A., Valenzuela, S., Jae Kook Lee, & Baresch, B. (2011). Blogging as a journalistic practice: A model linking perception, motivation, and behavior. Journalism, 12(5), 586–606. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884910388230 Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of “platforms.” New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 Gillespie, T. (2012). Can an Algorithm Be Wrong? Limn, 1(2). Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jk9k4hj Gillespie, T. (2014). The Relevance of Algorithms. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, 167. Gillmor, D. (2004). We the media: The rise of citizen journalists. National Civic Review, 93(3), 58–63. Gitlin, T. (1980). The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Goldhaber, M. H. (1997). The attention economy and the net. First Monday, 2(4). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/519 Goode, L. (2009). Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New Media & Society, 11(8), 1287–1305. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809341393 335 Graeff, E., Stempeck, M., & Zuckerman, E. (2014). The battle for “Trayvon Martin”: Mapping a media controversy online and off-line. First Monday, 19(2). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4947 Grimmelmann, J. (2015). The Virtues of Moderation. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2588493 Grudin, J. (1994). Computer-supported cooperative work: History and focus. Computer, (5), 19– 26. Grudin, J. (2012). A Moving Target: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction. In J. Jacko (Ed.), Human-Computer Interaction Handbook (3rd ed.). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from https://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/courses/5919/CourseReadings/GrudinHistoryHandb ookChapter-1.10.11.pdf Guo, L. (2014). Citizen Journalism in the Age of Weibo: The Shifang Environmental Protest. In E. Thorsen & S. Allan (Eds.), Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives (Vol. 2, pp. 333– 347). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Hannerz, U. (2003). Being there... and there... and there!: Reflections on Multi-Site Ethnography. Ethnography, 4(2), 201–216. http://doi.org/10.1177/14661381030042003 Hansen, K., Ward, J., Conners, J., & Neuzil, M. (1994). Local Breaking News: Sources, Technology, and News Routines. Journalism Quarterly, 71(3), 561–572. Hänska-Ahy, M. T., & Shapour, R. (2013). WHO’S REPORTING THE PROTESTS?: Converging practices of citizen journalists and two BBC World Service newsrooms, from Iran’s election protests to the Arab uprisings. Journalism Studies, 14(1), 29–45. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.657908 336 Haythornthwaite, C. (2009). Crowds and Communities: Light and Heavyweight Models of Peer Production. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Big Island, Hawaii: IEEE. Hedman, U., & Djerf-Pierre, M. (2013). THE SOCIAL JOURNALIST: Embracing the social media life or creating a new digital divide? Digital Journalism, 1(3), 368–385. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2013.776804 Hermida, A. (2010). From TV to Twitter: How ambient news became ambient journalism. Media/Culture Journal, 13(2). Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1732603 Hermida, A. (2012). TWEETS AND TRUTH: Journalism as a discipline of collaborative verification. Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 659–668. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.667269 Hermida, A. (2013). #JOURNALISM: Reconfiguring journalism research about Twitter, one tweet at a time. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 295–313. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2013.808456 Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C., & Zamith, R. (2014). Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 479–499. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12074 Heverin, T., & Zach, L. (2010). Microblogging for Crisis Communication: Examination of Twitter Use in Response to a 2009 Violent Crisis in the Seattle-Tacoma, Washington, Area. ISCRAM. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lisl_Zach/publication/268361197_Microblogging_fo 337 r_Crisis_Communication_Examination_of_Twitter_Use_in_Response_to_a_2009_Viole nt_Crisis_in_the_Seattle- Tacoma_Washington_Area/links/551a8b680cf244e9a4588838.pdf Highfield, T. (2016). Social media and everyday politics. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Hill, M. (2007, October 3). Wikinews and Multiperspectival Reporting. Retrieved from https://civic.mit.edu/blog/mako/wikinews-and-multiperspectival-reporting Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE. Hine, C. (Ed.). (2005). Virtual methods: issues in social research on the Internet. Oxford ; New York: Berg. Hodas, N. O., & Lerman, K. (2012). How visibility and divided attention constrain social contagion. In Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT), 2012 International Conference on and 2012 International Confernece on Social Computing (SocialCom) (pp. 249–257). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6406290 Hodas, N. O., & Lerman, K. (2013). Attention and visibility in an information-rich world. In Multimedia and Expo Workshops (ICMEW), 2013 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1–6). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6618396 Holton, A. E., Coddington, M., & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2013). Whose News? Whose Values?: Citizen journalism and journalistic values through the lens of content creators and consumers. Journalism Practice, 7(6), 720–737. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.766062 338 Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2011). Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping? Journalism, 12(2), 199–216. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884910388592 Hsu, W. (2014). Digital Ethnography Toward Augmented Empiricism: A New Methodological Framework. Journal of Digital Humanities, 3(1). Retrieved from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-1/digital-ethnography-toward-augmented- empiricism-by-wendy-hsu/ Hughes, A. L., & Palen, L. (2009). Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events. In Proceedings of the 6th International ISCRAM Conference. Gothenburg, Sweden. Hu, M., Liu, S., Wei, F., Wu, Y., Stasko, J., & Ma, K.-L. (2012). Breaking news on twitter. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2751–2754). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208672 Ingram, M. (2014, December 8). Andy Carvin launches social-media reporting team for First Look. Retrieved from https://gigaom.com/2014/12/08/andy-carvin-launches-social- media-reporting-team-for-first-look/ Iriberri, A., & Leroy, G. (2009). A life-cycle perspective on online community success. ACM Computing Surveys, 41(2), 1–29. http://doi.org/10.1145/1459352.1459356 Iyengar, S., & Hahn, K. S. (2009). Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 19–39. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460- 2466.2008.01402.x Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press. 339 Jenkins, H., Shresthova, S., Gamber-Thompson, L., Kligler-Vilenchik, N., & Zimmerman, A. (2016). By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. New York, NY: NYU Press. Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of communication. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press of Glencoe. Keegan, B. (2012). High Tempo Knowledge Collaboration in Wikipedia’s Coverage of Breaking News Events. Northwestern University. Retrieved from http://www.brianckeegan.com/papers/Dissertation.pdf Keegan, B., Gergle, D., & Contractor, N. (2012a). Do editors or articles drive collaboration?: multilevel statistical network analysis of wikipedia coauthorship. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 427–436). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145271 Keegan, B., Gergle, D., & Contractor, N. (2012b). Staying in the Loop: Structure and Dynamics of Wikipedia’s Breaking News Collaborations. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (pp. 1:1–1:10). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2462932.2462934 Keegan, B., Gergle, D., & Contractor, N. (2013). Hot Off the Wiki: Structures and Dynamics of Wikipedia’s Coverage of Breaking News Events. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5), 595–622. http://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212469367 Kim, A. (2000). Community building on the Web: Secret strategies for successful online communities. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press. Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B. A., Suh, B., & Mytkowicz, T. (2007). Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. World Wide Web, 1(2), 19. 340 Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. E. (2008). Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 37–46). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1460572 Kittur, A., Lee, B., & Kraut, R. E. (2009). Coordination in collective intelligence: the role of team structure and task interdependence. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1495–1504). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518928 Kockelman, P. (2013). The anthropology of an equation. Sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3), 33–61. Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2001). The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. Three Rivers Press. Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2010). Blur: How to know what’s true in the age of information overload. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Kramer, A. D., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS, 111(29), 8788–8790. Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2012). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591– 600). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1772751 341 Lampe, C., & Johnston, E. (2005). Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (pp. 11–20). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1099206 Lampe, C., & Resnick, P. (2004). Slash (dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 543–550). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985761 Lampe, C., Wash, R., Velasquez, A., & Ozkaya, E. (2010). Motivations to participate in online communities. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1927–1936). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753616 LaPoe, V. B., & Reynolds, A. (2013). From Breaking News to the Traditional News Cycle: A Qualitative Analysis of How Journalists Craft Resonance Through Storytelling. Electronic News, 7(1), 3–21. http://doi.org/10.1177/1931243113484311 Lasorsa, D. L., Lewis, S. C., & Holton, A. E. (2012). NORMALIZING TWITTER: Journalism practice in an emerging communication space. Journalism Studies, 13(1), 19–36. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2011.571825 Lawrence, R. (2000). The politics of force: Media and the construction of police brutality. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Leavitt, A. (2012). Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics. Retrieved from http://henryjenkins.org/2012/01/internet_blackout_sopa_reddit.html 342 Leavitt, A. (2015). “This is a Throwaway Account”: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 317–327). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675175 Leavitt, A., & Clark, J. A. (2014). Upvoting Hurricane Sandy: Event-based News Production Processes on a Social News Site. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1495–1504). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557140 Le Cam, F., & Domingo, D. (2015). The Tyranny of Immediacy: Gatekeeping Practices in French and Spanish Online Newsrooms. In T. Vos & F. Heinderyckx (Eds.), Gatekeeping in Transition. Taylor & Francis Online. Lee, C. P., & Paine, D. (2015). From The Matrix to a Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA): A Conceptual Framework of and for CSCW (pp. 179–194). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675161 Lee, K., Caverlee, J., Kamath, K. Y., & Cheng, Z. (2012). Detecting collective attention spam. In Proceedings of the 2nd Joint WICOW/AIRWeb Workshop on Web Quality (pp. 48–55). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2184316 Leonardi, P. M., & Barley, S. R. (2008). Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing. Information and Organization, 18(3), 159–176. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2008.03.001 Lerman, K. (2006). Social networks and social information filtering on digg. arXiv Preprint cs/0612046. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0612046 343 Lerman, K. (2007). User participation in social media: Digg study. In Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology Workshops, 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on (pp. 255–258). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4427583 Lerman, K., & Ghosh, R. (2010). Information Contagion: An Empirical Study of the Spread of News on Digg and Twitter Social Networks. ICWSM, 10, 90–97. Lerman, K., & Hogg, T. (2010). Using a model of social dynamics to predict popularity of news. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 621–630). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1772754 Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. Lewin, K. (1943). Forces behind food habits and methods of change. Bulletin of the National Research Council, 108, 35–65. Lewis, J., & Cushion, S. (2009). THE THIRST TO BE FIRST: An analysis of breaking news stories and their impact on the quality of 24-hour news coverage in the UK. Journalism Practice, 3(3), 304–318. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512780902798737 Lewis, S. C., Kaufhold, K., & Lasorsa, D. L. (2010). THINKING ABOUT CITIZEN JOURNALISM: The philosophical and practical challenges of user-generated content for community newspapers. Journalism Practice, 4(2), 163–179. http://doi.org/10.1080/14616700903156919 Livingston, S., & Bennett, W. L. (2003). Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News? Political Communication, 20(4), 363– 380. http://doi.org/10.1080/10584600390244121 344 Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (2nd ed.). Hampshire, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Madison, M. J. (2014). Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2495404 Majchrzak, A., Faraj, S., Kane, G. C., & Azad, B. (2013). The Contradictory Influence of Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing. Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication, 19(1), 38–55. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12030 Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Massanari, A. (2015). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 1461444815608807. Massanari, A. L. (2015). Participatory culture, community, and play: learning from reddit. New York: Peter Lang. Matias, J. N. (2016). Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout. CSCW. McCombs, M., & Shaw, D. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 176–187. McIntosh, S. (2008). COLLABORATION, CONSENSUS, AND CONFLICT: Negotiating news the wiki way. Journalism Practice, 2(2), 197–211. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512780801999360 McNelly, J. T. (1959). Intermediary communicators in the international flow of news. Journalism Quarterly, 36(1), 23–26. 345 McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 415–444. Meraz, S. (2012). The Sociality of News Sociology: Examining User Participation and News Selection Practices in Social Media News Sites. In B. St. John & K. Johnson (Eds.), News with a View: Essays on the Eclipse of Objectivity in Modern Journalism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Meraz, S., & Papacharissi, Z. (2013). Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on# Egypt. The International Journal of Press/politics, 1940161212474472. Mitchell, A., Kiley, J., Gottfried, J., & Guskin, E. (2013, October 24). The Role of News on Facebook: Common yet Incidental. PewResearchCenter. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/ Molotch, H., & Lester, M. (1974). News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals. American Sociological Review, 39(1), 101. http://doi.org/10.2307/2094279 Moody, K. E. (2011). Credibility or convenience? Political information choices in a media- saturated environment. Media International Australia, 140(1), 35–46. Murthy, D., & Longwell, S. A. (2013). TWITTER AND DISASTERS: The uses of Twitter during the 2010 Pakistan floods. Information, Communication & Society, 16(6), 837–855. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.696123 Nah, S., & Chung, D. S. (2012). When citizens meet both professional and citizen journalists: Social trust, media credibility, and perceived journalistic roles among online community news readers. Journalism, 13(6), 714–730. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884911431381 346 Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 79–88). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358975 Newman, M. E. (2005). Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. Contemporary Physics, 46(5), 323–351. Nip, J. Y. M. (2006). EXPLORING THE SECOND PHASE OF PUBLIC JOURNALISM1. Journalism Studies, 7(2), 212–236. http://doi.org/10.1080/14616700500533528 Nip, J. Y. M., & Fu, K. (2015). Networked framing between source posts and their reposts: an analysis of public opinion on China’s microblogs. Information, Communication & Society, 1–23. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1104372 Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D., & Preece, J. (2006). Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior. Electronic Commerce Research, 6(1), 7–20. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-006-5985-x Nov, O., Naaman, M., & Ye, C. (2009). Motivational, Structural and Tenure Factors that Impact Online Community Photo Sharing. In ICWSM. Citeseer. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.530.8746&rep=rep1&type=pdf Nov, O., & Rao, B. (2008). “GIVE ACCORDING TO YOUR ABILITIES, RECEIVE ACCORDING TO YOUR NEEDS.” Communications of the ACM, 51(5). Olson, M. (2003). The logic of collective action: public goods and the theory of groups (21. printing). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Ortega, F., Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., & Robles, G. (2008). On the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 347 41st Annual (pp. 304–304). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4439009 Osborne, M., & Dredze, M. (2014). Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus for breaking news: Is there a winner? In ICWSM. Retrieved from http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/miles/papers/icwsm14.pdf Paccagnella, L. (1997). Getting the Seats of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 3(1). Palen, L., & Liu, S. B. (2007). Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT- supported public participation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 727–736). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240736 Palen, L., Vieweg, S., Liu, S. B., & Hughes, A. L. (2009). Crisis in a Networked World: Features of Computer-Mediated Communication in the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech Event. Social Science Computer Review, 27(4), 467–480. http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439309332302 Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York, NY: Routledge. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Toward New Journalism(s): Affective news, hybridity, and liminal spaces. Journalism Studies, 16(1), 27–40. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.890328 Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 266–282. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01630.x 348 Pearson, G. D. H., & Kosicki, G. M. (2016). How Way-Finding is Challenging Gatekeeping in the Digital Age. Journalism Studies, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1123112 Perng, S.-Y., Buscher, M., Halvorsrud, R., Wood, L., Stiso, M., Ramirez, L., & Al-Akkad, A. (2012). Peripheral response: Microblogging during the 22/7/2011 Norway attacks. Retrieved from http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/54012/ Petrovic, S., Osborne, M., McCreadie, R., Macdonald, C., & Ounis, I. (2013). Can Twitter replace Newswire for breaking news? Retrieved from http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/82566/ Phillips, A. (2010). Old sources: New bottles. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age (pp. 87–101). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Pipek, V., Liu, S. B., & Kerne, A. (2014). Crisis Informatics and Collaboration: A Brief Introduction. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 23(4-6), 339–345. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9211-4 Poor, N. (2006). Mechanisms of an Online Public Sphere: The Website Slashdot. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(2), 00–00. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083- 6101.2005.tb00241.x Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosenstiel, T., & Olmstead, K. (2010). Understanding the participatory news consumer. Pew Internet and American Life Project, 1, 19–21. Qu, Y., Huang, C., Zhang, P., & Zhang, J. (2011). Microblogging after a major disaster in China: a case study of the 2010 Yushu earthquake. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 25–34). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958830 349 Qu, Y., Wu, P. F., & Wang, X. (2009). Online community response to major disaster: A study of Tianya forum in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In System Sciences, 2009. HICSS’09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1–11). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4755366 Reagle, J. (2012). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reich, Z., & Godler, Y. (2014). A Time of Uncertainty: The effects of reporters’ time schedule on their work. Journalism Studies, 15(5), 607–618. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.882484 Ren, Y., Kraut, R., & Kiesler, S. (2007). Applying Common Identity and Bond Theory to Design of Online Communities. Organization Studies, 28(3), 377–408. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607076007 Resnick, P., & Varian, H. R. (1997). Recommender systems. Communications of the ACM, 40(3), 56–58. Reynolds, A., & Barnett, B. (2003). This Just In: How National TV News Handled the Breaking “Live” Coverage of September 11. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 80(3). Ribes, D. (2014). Ethnography of scaling, or, how to a fit a national research infrastructure in the room (pp. 158–170). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624 Ridings, C. M., & Gefen, D. (2006). Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(1), 00–00. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2004.tb00229.x 350 Robinson, S., & DeShano, C. (2011). “Anyone can know”: Citizen journalism and the interpretive community of the mainstream press. Journalism, 1464884911415973. Rotman, D., Preece, J., He, Y., & Druin, A. (2012). Extreme Ethnography: Challenges for Research in Large Scale Online Environments. In Proceedings of iConference 2012. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Salihefendic, A. (2015, December 8). How Reddit ranking algorithms work. Retrieved from https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work- ef111e33d0d9#.5g67p3e19 Saltzis, K. (2012). BREAKING NEWS ONLINE: How news stories are updated and maintained around-the-clock. Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 702–710. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.667274 Sandvig, C., Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., & Langbort, C. (2014). Auditing algorithms: Research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms. Data and Discrimination: Converting Critical Concerns into Productive Inquiry. Retrieved from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csandvig/research/Auditing%20Algorithms%20-- %20Sandvig%20-- %20ICA%202014%20Data%20and%20Discrimination%20Preconference.pdf Schudson, M. (2001). The objectivity norm in American journalism*. Journalism, 2(2), 149– 170. Schultz, F., Utz, S., & Göritz, A. (2011). Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media. Public Relations Review, 37(1), 20–27. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.12.001 351 Schultz, I. (2007). THE JOURNALISTIC GUT FEELING: Journalistic doxa, news habitus and orthodox news values. Journalism Practice, 1(2), 190–207. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512780701275507 Scott, J., Millard, D., & Leonard, P. (2015). Citizen Participation in News: An analysis of the landscape of online journalism. Digital Journalism, 3(5), 737–758. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.952983 Shaw, A. (2012). Centralized and Decentralized Gatekeeping in an Open Online Collective. Politics & Society, 40(3), 349–388. http://doi.org/10.1177/0032329212449009 Shaw, A., & Hill, B. M. (2014). Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production: Laboratories of Oligarchy. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 215–238. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12082 Shaw, A., Zhang, H., Monroy-Hernandez, A., Munson, S., Hill, B. M., Gerber, E., … Minder, P. (2014). Computer supported collective action. Interactions, 21(2), 74–77. Shaw, D. (2008). Wikipedia in the Newsroom. American Journalism Review, 30(1), 40–46. Sheffer, M. L., & Schultz, B. (2010). Paradigm shift or passing fad? Twitter and sports journalism. International Journal of Sport Communication, 3(4), 472–484. Shklovski, I., Palen, L., & Sutton, J. (2008). Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 127–136). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1460584 Shoemaker, P. (1991). Gatekeeping. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Shoemaker, P., & Reese, S. (1996). Mediating the message: theories of influences on mass media content (2nd ed). White Plains, N.Y: Longman. 352 Shoemaker, P., & Vos, T. (2009). Gatekeeping Theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Silva, L., Goel, L., & Mousavidin, E. (2009). Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter. Information Systems Journal, 19(1), 55–81. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.2008.00304.x Simon, H. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications and the public interest (pp. 37–72). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Sood, S. O., Churchill, E. F., & Antin, J. (2012). Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(2), 270–285. Stanoevska-Slabeva, K., Sacco, V., & Giardina, M. (2012). Content Curation: a new form of gatewatching for social media? In International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, TX. Retrieved from http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2012/papers/Katarina.pdf Starbird, K., & Palen, L. (2012). (How) Will the Revolution Be Retweeted?: Information Diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 7–16). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145212 Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. http://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326 Strömbäck, J., Karlsson, M., & Hopmann, D. N. (2012). DETERMINANTS OF NEWS CONTENT: Comparing journalists’ perceptions of the normative and actual impact of different event properties when deciding what’s news. Journalism Studies, 13(5-6), 718– 728. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.664321 353 Suen, C. Y. (1979). N-gram statistics for natural language understanding and text processing. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, (2), 164–172. Suh, B., Hong, L., Pirolli, P., & Chi, E. H. (2010). Want to be retweeted? large scale analytics on factors impacting retweet in twitter network. In Social computing (socialcom), 2010 ieee second international conference on (pp. 177–184). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5590452 Sutton, J., Gibson, C. B., Spiro, E. S., League, C., Fitzhugh, S. M., & Butts, C. T. (2015). What it Takes to Get Passed On: Message Content, Style, and Structure as Predictors of Retransmission in the Boston Marathon Bombing Response. PLOS ONE, 10(8), e0134452. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134452 Tandoc, E. C. (2014). Journalism is twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping. New Media & Society, 1461444814530541. Taylor, S., & Bogdan, R. (1998). Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley. Terveen, L., & Hill, W. (2001). Beyond recommender systems: Helping people help each other. HCI in the New Millennium, 1, 487–509. Thompson, J. B. (2005). The New Visibility. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(6), 31–51. http://doi.org/10.1177/0263276405059413 Thorson, K., & Wells, C. (2015). Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age: Curated Flows. Communication Theory, n/a–n/a. http://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12087 354 Thurman, N., & Newman, N. (2014). The Future of Breaking News Online?: A study of live blogs through surveys of their consumption, and of readers’ attitudes and participation. Journalism Studies, 15(5), 655–667. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.882080 Tran, M. (2009). Beyond bias: Wikipedia and the construction of knowledge. Journal of Digital Research and Publishing, 3(1), 48–56. Treem, J. W., & Leonardi, P. M. (2012). Social media use in organizations: Exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. Communication Yearbook, 36, 143–189. Tremayne, M. (2007). Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesizing Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media. In M. Tremayne (Ed.), Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media (pp. 261–272). New York, NY: Routledge. Tuchman, G. (1978). Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York, NY: Free Press. Tufekci, Z. (2013). “ Not This One”: Social Movements, the Attention Economy, and Microcelebrity Networked Activism. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764213479369. Tufekci, Z. (2014). Big questions for social media big data: Representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. In Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.7400 Tuggle, C. A., & Huffman, S. (2001). Live Reporting in Television News: Breaking News or Black Holes? Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 42(2), 335–344. Usher, N. (2014a). Making news at The New York Times. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 355 Usher, N. (2014b, May 12). Immediacy vs. importance: The tension underlying how the NYTimes.com homepage gets made. Retrieved from http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/immediacy-vs-importance-the-tension-underlying- how-the-nytimes-com-homepage-gets-made/ Van der Walt, P., & Van Brakel, P. (2000). Task analysis of the webmaster: results of an empirical study. Aslib Proceedings, 52(1), 20–38. http://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000006998 Veenstra, A. S., Iyer, N., Park, C. S., & Alajmi, F. (2014). Twitter as “a journalistic substitute”? Examining# wiunion tweeters’ behavior and self-perception. Journalism, 1464884914521580. Vertesi, J. (2009). Seeing Like a Rover: Images in interaction on the Mars exploration rover mission. Cornell University. Viegas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & Van Ham, F. (2007). Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia. In System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 78–78). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4076527 Vis, F. (2013). TWITTER AS A REPORTING TOOL FOR BREAKING NEWS: Journalists tweeting the 2011 UK riots. Digital Journalism, 1(1), 27–47. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2012.741316 von Hippel, E., & von Krogh, G. (2003). Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science. Organization Science, 14(2), 209–223. Von Krogh, G. (2002). The communal resource and information systems. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 11(2), 85–107. 356 Vu, H. T. (2014). The online audience as gatekeeper: The influence of reader metrics on news editorial selection. Journalism, 15(8), 1094–1110. Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Hanitzsch, T. (Eds.). (2009). The handbook of journalism studies. New York: Routledge. Walgrave, S., & Van Aelst, P. (2006). The Contingency of the Mass Media’s Political Agenda Setting Power: Toward a Preliminary Theory. Journal of Communication, 56(1), 88–109. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00005.x Wall, M. (2015). Citizen Journalism: A retrospective on what we know, an agenda for what we don’t. Digital Journalism, 3(6), 797–813. http://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.1002513 Wang, T. (2013, May 13). Big Data Needs Thick Data. Retrieved from http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/05/13/big-data-needs-thick-data/ Welser, H. T., Cosley, D., Kossinets, G., Lin, A., Dokshin, F., Gay, G., & Smith, M. (2011). Finding social roles in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (pp. 122–129). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778 White, D. M. (1950). The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–391. Wise, K., Hamman, B., & Thorson, K. (2006). Moderation, Response Rate, and Message Interactivity: Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Intent to Participate. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(1), 24–41. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00313.x Wu, S., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A., & Watts, D. J. (2011). Who says what to whom on twitter. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web (pp. 705– 714). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1963504 357 Xu, W. W., & Feng, M. (2014). Talking to the Broadcasters on Twitter: Networked Gatekeeping in Twitter Conversations with Journalists. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(3), 420–437. http://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.935853 Yang, H.-L., & Lai, C.-Y. (2010). Motivations of Wikipedia content contributors. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6), 1377–1383. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.04.011 Zeng, L., Starbird, K., & Spiro, E. S. (2016). Rumors at the Speed of Light? Modeling the Rate of Rumor Transmission during Crisis. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emma_Spiro/publication/282852459_Rumors_at_the _Speed_of_Light_Modeling_the_Rate_of_Rumor_Transmission_during_Crisis/links/561 ea1ba08aec7945a26d6b1.pdf Zhu, L., & Lerman, K. (2014). A Visibility-based Model for Link Prediction in Social Media. Retrieved from http://ase360.org:8080/handle/123456789/79

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Virtually human? Negotiation of (non)humanness and agency in the sociotechnical assemblage of virtual influencers

PDF

Sunsetting: platform closure and the construction of digital cultural loss

PDF

Staying ahead of the digital tsunami: strategy, innovation and change in public media organizations

PDF

The YouTube phenomenon: YouTube stars eliminating stereotypes in new media

PDF

Collaboration: is it worth it? The Magnolia Community Initiative from the perspective of initiative partner participants

PDF

Essays on information design for online retailers and social networks

PDF

A community on the air: Latino Los Angeles and the rise of Spanish-language TV in the United States, 1960-1990

Asset Metadata

Creator Leavitt, Alexander C. (author)

Core Title Upvoting the news: breaking news aggregation, crowd collaboration, and algorithm-driven attention on reddit.com

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 08/01/2016

Defense Date 05/24/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aggregation,algorithms,attention,breaking news,collaboration,coordination,crowds,gatekeeping,information flows,mixed methods,network gatekeeping,news,OAI-PMH Harvest,reddit,social media

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Williams, Dmitri (committee chair), Ananny, Mike (committee member), Wixon, Dennis (committee member)

Creator Email aleavitt@usc.edu,alexleavitt@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-297862

Unique identifier UC11280449

Identifier etd-LeavittAle-4701.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-297862 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LeavittAle-4701-0.pdf

Dmrecord 297862

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Leavitt, Alexander C.; CC BY-NC-SA. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Type texts

Copyright Leavitt, Alexander C.; CC BY-NC-SA. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA