”DET KAN TILL OCH MED FÖRSTÖRA LIV”. En kritisk diskursanalys om nyhetsmediernas framställning av sociala medier-kunnighet i samband med skvallerkonton

Abstract

This study deals with social media literacy by examining how media discuss the so-called rumor accounts on popular networking sites. This topic is relevant since this phenomenon first gained a lot of media attention back in 2012, with “Instagram-upploppen” making major headlines. Even though this occurred over 10 years ago, rumor accounts are still making headlines in the media. Media and information literacy is something that has been around for quite some time, and with society and the media landscape evolving, it too has opened research up for many different fields within itself. One of the bigger research fields being media literacy, which has been one of the biggest influences on what we today call social media literacy. Social media literacy emphasizes the importance of social relationships withing our media. Social media literacy consists of different competencies which guide our social media use. It is therefore valuable to examine rumor accounts with the help of social media literacy. There is also a research gap in connecting cyberbullying (which rumor accounts are an expression of) which happens on social media and social media literacy. Since the media has reported on many of these incidents with rumor accounts, it has played a role in portraying what they are about and what it means to be social media literate. They portray this by discourse, where they then can convey different power relations and construct ideas about social media literacy. Furthermore, the media will always have readers or an audience, which means that the media potentially forms the opinion of the matter. Previous research has tended to study social media literacy and its meaning with qualitative methods, primarily interviews or focus groups. Even the fewer quantitative methods often consist of surveys or questionnaires. These methods fail to include how the media discourse tends to be constructed. The media does however play an important part in this since society takes part in reading different newspapers. This is then taken into consideration when we think about what it means to be social media literate. My aim of this study thus became to examine how social media literacy is made visible through the media discourse. This is done through the chosen cases which happened between 2019-2023. This is furthermore done through a critical perspective. My research questions are: ➢ RQ1: How do the chosen news articles conceptualize social media literacy? ➢ RQ2: Which agents are pointed out as key in relation to social media literacy? ➢ RQ3: How can the conceptualizations and agents be understood as a part of the risk perspective. To answer these questions, I use critical discourse analysis. This is also referred to as CDA. I adapted the usage of CDA much to my aim and research questions, I however based the method on Fairclough (1989:1992) and Berglez (Berglez i Ekström & Johansson, 2019:243) who was partly inspired by Fairclough. Critical discourse analysis opens for the possibility to describe and interpret the material (Fairclough, 1989:26). Furthermore, by implementing certain elements of these stages, I constructed my dimensions for analysis. These consist of the dimensions I call description of text, intertextuality, and agency. Down below I have listed what I based these dimensions on and what their purpose is for this study. ➢ Description of text: Seeks answers to questions as how is it written about social media literacy explicitly and implicitly? Are there more or less obvious aspects to rumor accounts? This dimension is based on the descriptive stage of CDA, where I examine how social media literacy and rumor accounts are described. ➢ Intertextuality: Seeks answers to questions as if there are comparisons to other rumor accounts and what that represents? How does the text relate to the surrounding society with power relations in mind? Which functions within social media do the rumor accounts or other users using? This is based on the interpretive stage of CDA, where I interpret how the text relates to the more hands-on aspects of social media and the surrounding society. ➢ Agency: Who are the actors pointed out within the text? How can they be seen within social media literacy? How much space do they get? How active or passive are they? Who are being affected by rumor accounts? What roles are assigned to them? This dimension is based on examining the power relations and ideology which lays behind the construction of the text. Additionally, I would like to point out that the first two dimensions together help answer the first research question and the third dimension helps to answer the second one. First when the results of these two questions are answered, the third question can be answered. However, there is some overlapping with the questions within the dimensions. I then gathered my material by going onto Retriever. I searched for these rumor accounts by limiting myself to the articles posted by local, regional, and national news distributors. I however did not collect articles that discussed rumor accounts on a professional level, because this would consist of another type of quality which could lead to the usage of policy terms. I also limited the term rumor account to not include celebrity gossip, since they are not commonly called a national problem much like the rumor accounts about the youth are. I ended up with 12 articles, after going through 52 articles. I choose those who discussed the rumor accounts, meaning those who did not only mention it shortly because the article is about something totally different. The main findings in this study partly consist of how the rumor accounts are portrayed in the media. This is a matter of who, what and where. The users behind the accounts are anonymous and it is rather difficult to find out who has made the account. The question of who also refers to who is being mentioned on different posts by the accounts. The question of what refers to what is being posted by these accounts, where the articles showed tendencies to highlight the deeply offensive content which would often be considered as slander. However, the articles could also portray the rumor accounts as more humorous, where a few students said that it sometimes can be entertaining content as well. The question of where refers to which platform the account exists on. The articles showed that some social media platforms, predominantly Instagram, is common knowledge and does not need an explanation. Another popular platform on which the users would create accounts was Tellonym, which often needed a more in-depth description. I also found that in relation to previous research, the competencies valued the most in the articles are the affective competencies. This is because the articles had an assumption that everyone already knows how to operate and get access to social media, which would be the technical competencies. Furthermore, the cognitive competencies were not valued as high. This was because it is more about the fact that you were exposed rather than if the information was true or not. The actors that are pointed out in the articles consist of the school, police, parents, and the youth. Those who had the power to identify the problem were mostly the schools and police, with the youth slightly inferior to them. The youth who however were able to speak on the matter, either through the other actors (for example if a teacher brought up what the students have said) or directly to the journalist, were never direct victims of the rumor accounts. They were mostly indirect victims, with the constant fear or worry of being exposed. What’s more, there was an overwhelming need expressed for parents to have discussions with their children about social media. This could be about going through their following together, or simply talking about what is happening with the rumor accounts. This would also happen spontaneously. The question of how to connect this information to the previous studies made on risks of using SNS (social networking sites), was handled by dividing the different kinds of risks into groups. These were made up by different threats, who I connected with integrity, digital footprints and mental health. This leads to the fact that there is a very large need for developing the youth’s social media literacy and its competencies. With learning these, everyone develops knowledge about how to behave on the internet. I therefore conclude that social media literacy is made visible by highlighting the lack there of. In light of rumor accounts, the negative side of not being social media literate is made clear. The schools have to implement different classes in teach it spontaneously, likewise the parents must discuss it spontaneously with their children. On top of that the socialization of social media literacy is very heavy towards the affective side, it could perhaps benefit from having a more well-rounded education with multiple perspectives in mind. Based on these findings, future research could benefit from investigating quantitative aspects of this phenomenon by for example looking into different patterns of shaping social media literacy. For example, you could dive into which forms of parental mediation is the most used one since it is not having the desired effect. To get a wider perspective, one could also examine different synonyms used for these types of accounts. One that emerged while writing this essay in Swedish were the so-called “exposing accounts”. Keywords: Media literacy, social media literacy, media discourse, rumor account