Policing and social media: The framing of technological use by Canadian newspapers (2005–2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As digital platforms that expand opportunities to create, distribute, and access content online, social media are transforming the policing landscape. While scholars have considered social media’s contradictory effects on police services’ public image and operational capacity, less is known about how patterns of technological use are reported within the mainstream press. Employing a mixed-methods content analysis, this article assesses how Canadian newspapers framed the policing-social media relationship over a 15-year period, and how such representations can affect public opinion and policy. It finds, despite minor fluctuations over time and across outlets, news organizations prioritized police perspectives and offered overwhelmingly favourable assessments with social media being constructed as a valuable tool of crime prevention and control. The broader implications of these findings for perceptions of law enforcement and relations between the news media and institutional power are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".