Twitter

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Margaret Ng, whose interest is in the transition of journalists to other platforms following the enshittification of Twitter by Elon Musk. Twitter had been crucial to journalism for years, but after his takeover Musk began to suspend the accounts of various journalists who had offended his fragile ego; many journalists responded by sharing their Mastodon or other contact details, and saying they would leave Twitter – but did this actually happen, and how are journalists now using other social media platforms?

This project examined the activities of some 861 journalists on …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

From this perspective, elite narratives from one or another side of politics can influence media narratives, and this in turn influences public narratives; there is therefore likely to be a narrative competition between elites as they seek …

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

There are 461 MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, of whom 20% are women; there is …

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The present study examines this with a particular view to cross-platform content flows and time-series analysis of the distribution …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The focus here is on Twitter and YouTube, working with some 18 million tweets and 59,000 YouTube videos between 2012 and 2022 that contain the term ‘woke’ and its derivations. These were addressed through …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.

The project gathered some 23,000 images from the three platforms during the two presidential campaigns, focussing on the two presidential candidates; it used the Google Vision API to identify features in these …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

, and starts with Ryan Moore. Past research has explored the impact of social media on access to mis- and disinformation sources, but remains somewhat inconclusive or very context- and platform-specific. Some of this is drawing on self-reporting; some on browsing data (where it usually focusses on direct referrals from social media platforms); a more indirect link has yet to be explored in full.

Here, social media posts may lead people to other places online that then lead …

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms. To do so, however, also would enable us to better understand the cross-platform network of single-platform publics, and thereby the broader media ecosystem.

Information sharing ecosystems can be defined in various ways; here, they are defined by a …