Elections

I’m a little late to the post-lunch session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, which has started with Ana Margarida Barreto’s paper on discussions of climate change on eleven Portuguese parties’ Facebook pages. They investigated the presence of various climate change-related topics on those pages.

Two broadly green parties talked about climate change considerably more than any of the others; though during the election all other parties also talk somewhat more about climate change. Most parties share a substantial number of images and videos, though the far-right populist Chega party exclusively shared links and no audiovisual content.

Minor and …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.

This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with Mona Krewel, whose interest is in (micro-)targeted advertising in elections; she explores this here especially in the context of the 2024 US presidential election. All parties use such advertising, and tend to target voters whom they assume are ideologically close to them; our understanding of how this works is limited, however, and based largely on self-reporting from campaign managers (which is not necessarily reliable).

A different approach to this is via the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, which is problematic for other reasons; the present project explored the targeting strategies of some …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …