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The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat, whose interest is in digital protest cultures on TikTok, or in what he calls the overspilt public sphere. TikTok has become considerably more important in recent years, and this has had some interesting consequences; in Russia, for instance, TikTok now limits its content to Russian-made material, and Russian youth are actively seeking to circumvent such restrictions.

The Russian media environment is complicated and hostile, with comprehensive state capture of almost all media outlets and outright censorship of reporting on the Ukraine war. But social media have proved much …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 is Robert Topinka, whose interest is in reactionary digital cultures in the ‘post-pandemic’ environment. He is also releasing a report on this work. Such reactionary politics in the context of COVID-19 largely involves the rejection of the general consensus, and a call to take control of your own body. This is linked with far-right body culture, and any debunking and criticism from the mainstream just ends up reinforcing the message.

Instead of tracking extremist content to label it as disinformation and debunk it, there is therefore a need to understand how people drift …

It’s a very foggy Friday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’m chairing a morning session on protests, politics, and the digital that begins with a paper by Roman Horbyk, on mobile communication on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. This is a project that was launched well before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, also covering the ongoing hostilities predating it.

Roman begins by noting the deep mediatisation of contemporary society; our urban environments are now dense with digital communication technologies, but is this also the case for the frontlines of recent wars? There are some studies already of …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

The project drew on nine semi-structured interviews with UK-based journalists, editors, and fact-checkers in January 2020 to explore how they understood disinformation, and how saw their role in tackling it. Such perspectives may well have evolved further in the face of the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic, of course.

Much of the focus in the journalists’ responses was on political lies at this stage, therefore, and they noted that politicians now appear far …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is another one of my temporary University of Zürich colleagues, Anna Staender. Her study sought to develop a typology of the spreaders of misinformation across multiple countries. These may include state actors, politicians and celebrities, or alternative media outlets, for instance, but not enough is known yet about their impact; the specific focus here is therefore on alternative or hyperpartisan media actors.

Previous research has seen such alternative media as a corrective to mainstream media, but such alternative media outlets may now also simply attack opposing political views at the expense of …

The final session on this Thursday at ECREA 2022 that I’m attending is on disinformation, and begins with a paper by Laura Alonso-Muñoz and Andreu Casero-Ripollés that is being presented by proxy. It focusses on the circulation of misinformation via social media in the context of COVID-19. Residents in the Global South were most active in spreading such misinformation, it appears, and the present study therefore compares Spain, Brazil, India, and the United States via a quantitative survey of some 2800 people (or about 700 per country) in July 2021. These countries were selected because of their high 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.

Deliberation can be assessed against five key aspects: reciprocity, argumentation, sourcing, politeness, and civility. The study used this framework to explore the Facebook responses to original comments on the Facebook pages of …

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 …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Anna-Louisa Sacher, whose focus is on the debate about freedom of speech in Germany. Such debates are increasingly heated now, both with respect to terms like “cancel culture” and to a perceived “hate climate”. Right-wing populist actors have particularly inflamed such debates by focussing on specific culture war issues.

There are only a few studies that have studied people’s understandings and perceptions of their freedom of speech in Germany, however. The present study begins from the premise of the democratic dilemma that balances free speech and freedom from discrimination. This is …

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.)

Such participation is thus affected by the perceived climate of opinion within society overall, and the opinion climate in a specific communicative situation. It …