03/24/2022
By Jason Carter

The UMass Lowell College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences' Global Studies Ph.D. Program invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Gabriella Pruit Santos on "When the Moon is Bright, Darkness Lingers: An analysis of social media influence on political power, censorship, & watchdog journalism in democratic systems across Central America and the United States."

Candidate: Gabriella M. Pruitt Santos
Date: Thursday, April 7, 2022
Time: 10 a.m. EDT
Location: Zoom: Please email gabriella_pruitsantos@student.uml.edu for Zoom link

Dissertation Title: When the moon is bright, darkness lingers: An analysis of social media influence on political power, censorship, & watchdog journalism in democratic systems across Central America and the United States

Committee members:

  • Jenifer Whitten-Woodring (Chair)
  • Angélica Durán-Martínez
  • Mona Kleinberg

Abstract:
Since the mid-2010s, social media have become an integral part of political communication. Notable political leaders like former president Donald Trump in the United States and current president Nayib Bukele in El Salvador garner much of their popular support through online communication platforms. Collective action campaigns like the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests gather global social support with hashtag activism on networks like Facebook and Twitter. Social media incorporate a greater diversity of actors into the political communication system. At the same time, social media exacerbate preexisting challenges for media, especially in the relationship or nexus between journalists and political leaders. While the social media dynamic in political communication captivates current literature, most studies still concentrate on the Global North. Therefore, this dissertation project concentrates on the emerging focus on Latin America through a lens that spans from the United States to the Central American sub-region. Analysis centers on the role of social media in influencing political news agendas using mixed qualitative methods between three papers. The first paper employs content analysis of news articles and social media posts about the Dakota Access Pipeline protests during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The paper highlights the emergence of a media boomerang effect on the news agenda from social media by small, independent journalists and underlines the persisting mainstream dominance in political news. The second and third papers utilize semi-structured interviews with political journalists in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The second paper looks at the role of social media in Central American media systems. The analysis confirms the continuation of mainstream media dominance in the named periphery countries while at the same time indicating that social media provide greater opportunities with fewer economic constraints for small, independent watchdog journalists. The third paper draws on implications from the second, analyzing journalists’ perspectives on the effect social media have on the leader-journalist nexus. The paper reveals that journalists perceive social media use to exacerbate violence against the press and undermine watchdog tendencies through political leaders’ media control. Through the multi-regional focus, these papers define the emergence of the media boomerang effect on political news agenda setting as social media use between journalists, political leaders, and the public continues to affect political communication on a global scale.