Social Media

It’s the second and last day of the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference in Berlin, and it starts with a panel on polarisation that I’ve had a hand in organising. We begin with Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on discursive polarisation. He begins by pointing out that polarisation is often ill-defined, and the communicative dimension in particular is often under-conceptualised and under-researched.

Discursive polarisation is when debates break apart: a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication. There is also a more intuitive aspect to polarisation, as is demonstrated for instance with the German debate around the Letzte Generation climate activists …

The last speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Christian Strippel and Sophie Jokerst, whose interest is in the democratic potentials of social media. They begin by introducing the results from the Weizenbaum Institute’s panel survey – which in Germany produced generally positive views of the overall impact of the Internet on society, but far more mixed views on social media in particular. What drives this, and how does it affect political participation online?

Heavy consumption of media affects perceptions of the social world, especially if personal experience is congruent with these perception. These patterns may also be …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Luna Staes, whose focus is also on online user engagement with street protests. Social movement organisations are using social media to engage with the public, and this also generates user engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) that provide instant feedback on online publics’ appetite for protest messages.

But to what extent do protest messages actually resonate, and what explains such user engagement: is this related to the features of the actual protest, of the content about the protest, or of the digital communication style itself? The present study examined …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Svetlana Chuikina, whose interest is in how Russian anti-war activists (including in the diaspora around the world) engage in the construction of media events in order to promote their messages. There are a number of such groups, including the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), the Youth Democratic Movement (VESNA), and Technologies for Social Good (Teplica).

Svetlana is taking a long-term perspective on these movements, and on how their positioning has changed over the past ten years or so. She also interviewed Russian participants in anti-war demonstrations in Stockholm, in order …

The next session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference starts with a paper by Pablo Jost, whose interest is in protest events. Protests often aim to generate media attention, yet such media attention is often not supportive of protests, especially when they are disruptive (or can be portrayed as such) – and this produces more critical perception and less identification with protests.

To explore this further, this project therefore studied the Website of the Last Generation climate protest movement in Germany to identify their protest events, and coded their 108 protests between November 2021 and December 2022 by type; it also …

The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.

Media use can contribute to perceived social cohesion in society if people consume the same media, if such media content supports some level of social cohesion and shared experience, and supports trust and tolerance. Such media often tend to be high-quality rather than alternative and hyperpartisan media.

How is media use associated with social …

The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session on alternative media is Pablo Porten-Cheé, whose focus is on countering misinformation with narratives. He begins with an example of the public discourse in Slovakia about the Roma community. Dominant, prejudiced views circulate, but are also countered by some engaged users – yet such correctives may not be particularly effective if they are only using facts and are directed at little-engaged audiences; responses that take a more personal and affective narrative approach may be more powerful.

How can this effect of personal stories be explained? The underlying theory here is …

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.

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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …

The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).

This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …