Upvote My News: The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation for Breaking News on reddit.com

Citizen participation in crisis communication increasingly occurs in social media contexts. As some platforms – e.g., social news sites – evolve around collaborative voting, filtering, and information sharing, the aggregation of breaking news information during crisis situations appears more often as an emergent practice in these online communities. Drawing from 53 interviews and descriptive quantitative analysis of reddit posts and comments, this paper presents a qualitative case study examining reddit.com members aggregate information during crisis events within the context of reddit's post/comment structure, crowd voting, and ranking algorithms. Using the lens of network gatekeeping, the paper shows how participants evaluate sources, organize information, and verify details to demonstrate how different affordances and limitations of information production allow or restrict particular types of network gatekeeping.