Deciding what’s (sharable) news: Social movement organizations as curating actors in the political information system

Abstract

News is often sourced not directly from journalistic outlets, but from various actors that “curate” content into individuals' information networks. Although these curating actors impact the news individuals receive, little is known about their behind-the-scenes curatorial decision-making. Addressing this gap, I isolated one kind of curating actor in the flow of political information: social movement organizations. Drawing on an ethnographic case study from the U.S. transgender movement, I analyzed the “logics of curation” at play in organizations' social media practices. These logics included the internal criteria by which they decided what news stories to share, how they decided when and by which media each story should be shared, and what they hoped to achieve as the end result of curation.