Political conflict news on Twitter : an agenda-setting perspective

Abstract EN

Objectives: The main purpose of this article is to determine whether there is a common intermedia agenda-setting among Kuwaiti Twitter news accounts during a series of political developments.

Using Kuwait as a case study, this article compared the topics that were covered by two media platforms on Twitter, namely Almajles news (@almajles) and Khabar Ajel news (@breakingkw).

In addition, the study investigated how these accounts reflected on the public agenda-setting by examining the users' comments as a measurement of the public agenda.

Method: A total of 604 news stories were analyzed using a con tent analysis methodology.

Results: The study found that Twitter news accounts were highly consistent regarding issue salience, thus suggesting a high intermedia agenda-setting effect (inter-account agenda setting in this ease as reference to Twitter news providers).

Moreover, the analysis showed that the agenda-setting effect is present to a high degree between Twitter news providers and the public agendas that were measured by the number of comments.