Social Media Policies as Social Control in the Newsroom: A Case Study of the New York Times on Twitter

Drawing on theoretical insights from social control in the newsroom, occupational subgroups, and news engagement literature, this study leverages The New York Times's recent update of social media policies to examine its impacts on NYT news workers' social media practices as well as user engagement with these workers. Utilizing large-scale digital trace data collected from Twitter (Ntweets = 185,969, Nnews workers = 549) and a natural experimental design, we found that NYT news workers conformed to the policy update by reducing their tweeting frequency, prioritizing professional over personal tweeting, and increasing fact-based over opinionated tweeting when posting professional content. However, there was no significant difference in conformity to the policy update across workers of different professional ranks, news beats, or working locations. Finally, NYT news workers' adherence to the policy update did not affect user engagement on Twitter.