Abstract
The Snowden affair gave rise to a huge public debate about not only the legitimacy of the secret surveillance programs he revealed but also about Snowden himself and about the accuracy of the information he leaked. In this paper we present an analysis of how the affair was discussed in the English language blogosphere, based on a corpus of 15,000 blog posts written about Snowden and published from June 2013 to June 2014, as a sub-corpus of a larger corpus of 100,000 blog posts on the topic of surveillance, written during the period 2006–2014. Automated tools are used to identify the topics that characterize the blogging about surveillance and the posts about the Snowden affair. Through an in-depth analysis of the blog posts that commented on Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM program for surveillance of social media users, we chart how bloggers responded to Snowden and his role in this disclosure, whether they found the information credible, and the extent to which they expressed criticism of the surveillance practices. The analysis is used as a basis for discussing the role of blogs in the civic engagement during the first phase of the Snowden affair.
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Notes
“Greenwald,” the name of the leading journalist working on Snowden for The Guardian, is mentioned.
Performed via the WordSmith software for corpus analysis, see http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/
Using the VOSON crawler from http://www.uberlink.com/
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the Research Council of Norway’s VERDIKT program (NTAP, project 213401). We are very grateful to Knut Hofland and Andrew Salway for their role in creating the corpus analyzed here.
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Elgesem, D., Feinerer, I. & Steskal, L. Bloggers’ Responses to the Snowden Affair: Combining Automated and Manual Methods in the Analysis of News Blogging. Comput Supported Coop Work 25, 167–191 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-016-9251-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-016-9251-z