Social Media

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiting Tong, whose interest is in the rhetorical and political community JianZheng in China. She begins with a metaphor of biological community organisms like the Aspen trees in Utah, which are connected by their roots and form one large organism.

JianZheng is similarly a rhetorical community that is bounded together by shared discursive processes (metaphors, analogies, satires) that play an endless process of hide-and-seek with the Chinese state. This is an ongoing process, even though current research on such processes tends to take a very event-based, limited view – there is …

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Zaneera Malik, whose focus is on the use of social media as a strategic political communication tool in the fragile democracy of Pakistan. The focus here is especially on the PTI party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, which lost the February 2024 election.

PTI won the 2018 elections and Khan became Prime Minister, but he lost office in 2022, and has been mired in political and legal controversy every since. Worse yet, PTI lost its election symbol, the cricket bat: because of limited literacy rates in Pakistan, each party …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yuan Zeng, whose interest is in the tactical uses of social media and their platform affordances by young people in China. This is especially against the backdrop of the ‘zero-COVID’ lockdown in China in 2022.

Young people use digital media on a daily basis to make sense of public issues; especially so during the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, this takes place within a digital authoritarian context that places individual user agency in relation to platform providers and the authoritarian state; this affects their digital media repertoire, their engagement with platform affordances …

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by Queensland state politicians in the lead-up to the October 2024 election. Even in spite of moves to ban TikTok in government departments and at the federal level for security reasons, candidates have been active on TikTok, and have been using it to build an ‘authentic’ personal brand – which requires immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness.

This study examined the posts made by the leading Queensland political candidates fir their performance features, topics, and use of humour; it found that all …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting our work on the discussions of the 2022 Qatar World Cup by online football communities (slides are below). This draws on the theory of third spaces: primarily apolitical spaces where political talk can emerge and often takes place in a more congenial, respectful manner. This means they have democratic potential: discussion there may be able to avoid political disagreement and the avoidance of political talk.

We apply this concept to the case of the Qatar World Cup, which was highly controversial for the Qatari …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hong Li, whose interest is in ‘grey actors’ in online public opinion. The case study here is the ‘Internet water army’: a group of users who are paid to post online comments on Chinese social media platforms in order to promote vested interests. This is an astroturfing effort for public relations and media manipulation, and has become a major social media industry in China.

Such users are ‘grey actors’ who manipulate public opinion; they cannot be easily distinguished from ordinary users since they often are ordinary users making some money on …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nazira Bairbek, whose focus is on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Kazakhstan; some Russian users in Kazakhstan responded to the invasion by asking Putin to annex Kazakhstan as well, for instance, while many Kazakh people took the side of Ukraine and feared Russian aggression against their own country.

This reflects the complicated post-colonial nature of many post-Soviet nations; they have fought for their independence from Russian influence since 1991, but maintain close relationships with Russia, and some people in these countries believe that they cannot survive without …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Caixie Tu, whose interest is in Hong Kong residents’ discussions about government ordinances on social media. The key question here is who speaks out on social media, and for what reasons.

Users’ cognitive responses can mediate such processes; this may include news attention, news knowledge, information elaboration, and other aspects, and engagement with heterogeneous information sources may be especially important. Individuals’ issue involvement, which may be value-relevant or outcome-relevant, may also affect their level of engagement in such debates.

How do the two types of issue involvement mediate the influence of …

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

Deliberative public communication research tends to remain strongly influenced by Habermasian normativity, but this is not necessarily very productive. It ignores the right of participants not to be deliberative, and therefore fails to fully understand the phenomenon of dissonant public spheres, or the cumulative nature of public discussion. We need to better understand how opinions accumulate online.

Big data approaches are central …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The project examined this through a representative nationwide survey of some 1,300 participants in China, assessing affective polarisation through a feeling thermometer and pro- and counter-attitudinal content exposure through self-reporting.

The results show that counter-attitudinal …