Blogs

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Emily Van Duyn, whose interest is in the negotiation of the personal and political in romantic relationships in the United States. While this has been studied so far especially for persisting relationships (and might therefore be affected by survivor bias), the present study focusses on relationships that ended, whether for political or other reasons.

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Heysung Lee, whose focus is on affective polarisation in multi-party systems. Affective polarisation has increasingly been recognised as an important factor, but has mainly been studied in bipolar political system like that of the United States, using tools like feeling thermometers; to assess it in multi-polar environments is more complicated.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with the great Helena Rauxloh. Her paper emerges from the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten, which builds on longitudinal Web tracking and survey data from some 4,000 participants in Germany. The key concept in this study is political efficacy, which is the feeling that political action has an impact on political processes.

The final presenter in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the excellent Hedwig Tønnesen, whose interest is in the strategies of political actors on three social media platforms. Social media are now widely used by such actors, of course, but have not necessarily delivered the wider democratic potential that some had seen in them; more often, they are simply used by parties to create engagement and mobilisation, or disseminate information and political advertising.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Mengyu Li, whose interest is in link-sharing patterns on Twitter and Reddit, here in the context of the abortion debate in the US following the Supreme Court’s abolition of Roe vs. Wade. Which information domains are critical in this context – health and welfare, civic and activism, political and legal, economic and employment information? How do social media platforms address these information needs? What primary sources are being shared here?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Francesco Bailo, whose focus is on the Italian Five Star Movement, or M5S. This was a disruptive political movement launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, and this study examined its activities across five platforms: Grillo’s blog, Meetup.com, the M5S Forum, Facebook, and the movement’s e-voting platform which was used to select electoral candidates. The focus here is on 2012 primary elections in the party.

The Sunday at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a session on digital affordances of social media platforms, and begins with a paper by Christian Baden. Social media are many and diverse, and their affordances keep changing; this still needs to be better understood. Social movements are also many and diverse, which also means that the intersections between social media and social movements can be various, and the particular political intentions and communicative purposes of those movements need to be considered in this.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Damiano Spina, who begins by highlighting the current challenges to the global information environment. In the IPIE survey of disinformation experts, politicians, social media platforms, and governments were seen as the most problematic sources of mis- and disinformation.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Giada Marino, presenting some of the work of the Vera.ai research project. Responding to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, the project focusses especially on the coordinated communication networks that share such content in order to influence and manipulate social media audiences, and has developed a content-agnostic tool that monitors the activities of identified problematic accounts.

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.