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The final speakers in this ECREA 2016 session are my QUT colleague Brenda Moon and I, presenting our comparative analysis of the uses of Twitter in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election. Below is our presentation:

Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns from Axel Bruns

The next speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Martin Nkosi Ndlela, who is also a contributor to our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. He shifts our focus to the use of social media in Kenyan elections. What are the democratic implications of rapid change in media systems in developing nations such as this, and what effect do new media have on civic engagement?

The first morning at ECREA 2016 starts with a session that celebrates the launch of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, and begins with a paper by my co-editor Gunn Enli. Her interest is in the question of authenticity: this has become a big theme in advertising for just about any product or service, also including politics. This may be seen as a response to the artificial aspects of the postmodern world.

The second ECREA 2016 keynote this evening is by Sabina Mihelj, who begins by acknowledging the substantial growth in eastern European media research, which has challenged and surpassed Cold War frameworks. We now have a better understanding of how the Cold War affected media and communication in east as well as west, and there is much in this history to be optimistic about.

But the ground has shifted again: several European countries now no longer want to be part of a democratic Europe, and the United States have just democratically elected a leader who actively opposes many democratic principles. The notions of democracy, and of Europe, as strikingly different across the countries of this continent. There no longer is a great deal of reasons to be optimistic.

It is 9 November and there are a few other things going on in the world, but here I am in Prague at the ECREA 2016 conference, which opens this evening with a couple of major keynotes. Time to put the shock about the electoral success of naked neo-fascism in the United States to one side and explore the broader trends in late western democracy, in a keynote by Peter Dahlgren.

He begins by suggesting that the events of today represent a historical rupture; late democracy has become a whole lot later, and the times are a great deal darker than before. We must be worried and angry, even, but also embrace an obstinate optimism that develops a vision for the future. We are now in a qualitatively different situation.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Caja Thimm, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in politics. She begins by noting the transnational adoption of standard Twitter affordances across a variety of political uses, by actors on all sides (from protesters to police). This can be understood using a functional operator model across the levels of Twitter operators, text, and function; but this is merely functional and not analytical. More needs to be done here.

The next speaker at AoIR 2016 is Jacqueline Vickery, whose focus is on the use of feminist hashtags such as #YesAllWomen as networked publics. These combine affective expressions of support with intimate citizenship and political activism in an ad hoc way. Political and affective dimensions are combined with the goals of such actions, and coordinated through the affordances of the platforms, such as the mechanism of hashtags themselves.

The next speaker in this packed AoIR 2016 session is Eugenia Siapera, whose focus is on hate speech and its regulation in social media. This is analysed by examining the Terms of Service of major social media platforms, as well as through interviews with key informants from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What constitutes acceptable and non-acceptable speech from the point of view of these companies? What underlying ideologies does this point to?

The final (no, really) session at AoIR 2016 starts with a paper by Stefania Milan, whose interest is in online protest. She begins by noting that semiotechnologies now play an important role as brokers. The emerging protest/media configurations affect the materiality of the process of meaning construction.

The final speaker in this morning panel at AoIR 2016 is Elliot Panek, who points out that social media are only one venue for political discourse, and that different platforms support different forms and qualities of discourse. Is it possible to develop robust, lasting frameworks for understanding such discourse that are not inherently tied to specific specific platforms, then?