Analyzing the Narrative Framing Pitfalls of Social Media Based on Propaganda Model

Abstract

Social media is a product of the web 2.0 era. It has always been regarded as a symbol of the spirit of "freedom" and "sharing" in this period. Early media optimists believed that social media would free democracy from the encroachment of mass media and expand the sphere of public opinion. With the development of digital technology and social media, the information content produced by the public on social media has the same dissemination ability as mass media to a certain extent. From a neoliberal perspective, such changes herald the overall rise of press freedom and freedom of opinion on social media. However, it remains to be seen whether social media can break through the social framework constructed by the mass media to achieve freedom of expression. Therefore, this paper explores this issue based on the classical theoretical frame in the political economy of the media-the Propaganda Model (PM). By selecting the "Bucha massacre" in the Russia-Ukraine conflict as the research object, and collecting and conducting qualitative research on the data of social media platforms, the results of this paper guide to an answer: with strong control from the mass media and social elites, it is difficult for social media to fulfill the expected breakthrough task it was entrusted with. The more serious situation is that contemporary social media has a great possibility of becoming a link in the propaganda framework.