Social Media Information Environments and Their Implications for the Uses and Effects of News: The PINGS Framework

Social media have become a central source for news and current affairs information. This article focuses on the overarching attributes that shape how people come in contact with news, engage with news, and are affected by news on social media. Although all social media are different and change constantly, news experiences on these platforms can consistently be characterized as personalized, incidental, non-exclusive, as well as granularized and social (PINGS). Accordingly, this article introduces the PINGS framework, which acts as a systematization of social media news experiences and can be used to map key opportunities and challenges of using news across various social media platforms. In addition to presenting the framework components, the article also discusses how researchers can investigate PINGS in empirical studies.