Social Media

The final presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Daniel Thiele, whose focus is on right-wing populist communication. This is highly visible in social media spaces and in the comments sections of news sites, and may both harm democratic debate or revitalise political engagement. The concrete question tackled by this paper, then, is how such right-wing populist content is affecting the deliberative quality of comments on Facebook.

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.

The next session at ECREA 2022 is on online deliberation, and begins with Dennis Frieß. He notes that participation in online discussion is now a popular form of online engagement, and normatively it is important that such discussions are pluralistic and inclusive – but in reality they are often dominated by a handful of participants. The question therefore is who speaks out in such online environments. (This also links to Spiral of Silence theory, of course.)

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is David Nicolas Hopmann, presenting on a multinational study of Europeans’ attitudes towards their news media diets as part of the curiously named ThreatPie project. The present paper explores people’s ideas about what a ‘healthy’ diet is; what diets they actually consume; and what perceptions they have of the media their peers consumed. This was done for Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK, with younger (18-25) and older (55+) adults. A larger survey of 18 countries will follow.

The next ECREA 2022 session is on media exposure, and begins with Ole Kelm. He notes the expansion of political participation through the use of online and social media; we now have institutional participation, protests, civic engagement, political consumerism, online activities, and other forms of participation both on- and offline. Political consumerism in particular includes elements such as boycotts, buycotts, discursive political consumerism, and lifestyle political consumerism.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Jule Scheper, who again highlights both the Spiral of Silence theory, but also the limited effects of such dynamics that have been observed empirically. Under what circumstances, then, might there be more significant effects? The present paper explores this for health communication in the context of COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Next up in this lively ECREA 2022 session on the Spiral of Silence is Oana Stefanita, whose focus is on the expression of hate speech against the Roma community in online spaces in Romania. Hate speech is now widespread and a major problem in online and social media, and takes a number of forms; while platforms are taking some efforts to remove such content, this also conflicts with ideas of ‘free speech’, and can be amplified by platform algorithms. And hate speech can have some very severe psychological and physical effects, of course.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Liz Solverson, who asks why the majority might remain silent on social media, with a particular focus on why young adults remain silent on political topics on social media. Liz worked with focus groups of young adults, exploring how they used social media for political and general purposes, how they experienced their relationship to political expression, and what they understood as good citizenship.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Marius Gerads, whose focus is on integrating hostile media perception into Spiral of Silence theory. People with such perception see the media tenor as dissonant with their own opinion; this leads them to perceive themselves as being in the minority, and Spiral of Silence theory thus suggests that these people would fall silent. But this isn’t what we can now observe; rather, many people with such perceptions are highly vocal in their media critiques.

For this first morning of ECREA 2022 proper, I’m starting with a session that explores the idea of the Spiral of Silence, and we start with a paper by Christiane Eilders. She begins by noting the importance of public opinion expression as a prerequisite to the public deliberation.