Blogs

It’s Friday morning, and the warm glow of being at an in-person AoIR 2022 conference still hasn’t worn off yet. I’m starting with the session on radicalisation, and the first paper is by Diana Zulli and Marcus Mann. They’re interested in early-stage radicalisation, which has been studied in offline and online contexts for some time already. This involves the radicalisation of beliefs, but also social processes of connection, and both are motivated by the search for significance and the development of new social networks.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Giovanni Daniele Starita, whose focus is on the endemic populist nature of political discourse, especially in digital spheres, in Italy. Not all Italian politicans are populist, but they all seem to ‘do’ populism – well beyond typical actors such as Berlusconi, Grillo, and Salvini.

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Maja Brandt Andreasen, whose focus is on Internet humour that normalises sexual violence in response to the #metoo movement. Humour is often dismissed as harmless (Maja describes this as the ‘just a joke’ discourse), and feminist reactions to such offensive content are attacked as undermining humorous discourse.