Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Elections

Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:55

Swiss Users’ Search Practices on Political Referendum Topics

Politics | Elections | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2022 |

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited. The current study explores this in the Swiss content, examining how often Swiss citizens search for information on upcoming referenda. Generally, such search practices may be related to demographic …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:53

Populist Communication Styles in the 2019 European Parliament Election

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Facebook | AoIR 2022 |

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals. This project explores this for the 2019 European Parliamentary election, which may be a particularly easy target for anti-elitist populist communication, and less so for people-centred communication.

The question here is how this plays out at the page and post level on …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:51

Social Media Advertising in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

Politics | Elections | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | AoIR 2022 |

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:42

Social Media Engagement in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

Electioneering in Pandemic Times: The 2022 Australian Federal Election on Facebook and Twitter from Axel Bruns
» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:40

Coordinated Social Media Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

Politics | Elections | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:38

Politicians’ and Journalists’ Tweets in the 2021 German Federal ELection

Politics | Elections | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 21 October 2022 23:41

Bringing Up Old Party Scandals on Twitter during Spanish Election Campaigns

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Twitter | ECREA 2022 |

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 21 October 2022 01:20

The Visual Communication Practices of Political Parties in Europe

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Facebook | ECREA 2022 |

The third presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Uta Rußmann, and examined the Facebook pages of political parties in the 2019 European elections. It focusses especially on the visual practices of such pages. User engagement with such content can shape political discourse, as it affects the visibility of the content on Facebook due to the platform’s algorithmic logics; parties actively adjust their social media practices to generate such engagement, of course. Negative statements, humour, personalised content, and populist statements are all seen as increasing engagement – as is multimedia content.

Visual forms are strongly connected with everyday political …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Wednesday 19 October 2022 19:41

Social Media Campaigning in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

Politics | Elections | Government | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | ECREA 2022 |

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

Independents’ Day? Political Campaigning on Social Media in the 2022 Australian Federal Election from Axel Bruns
» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 18 October 2022 06:08

Independents' Day? Political Campaigning on Social Media in the 2022 Australian Federal Election (ECREA 2022)

Politics | Elections | Government | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ECREA 2022 |
» continue reading...

Pagination

  • Previous page
  • 10
  • Next page
Elections
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.