Politics

I’m in Brno for the ECREA conference later this week, but we start with a preconference organised by the DigiWorld network on social media and elections research. The first speaker is Tuuli Tomperi, whose focus is on the affective construction of political meaning through multimodal campaign content, in Finland.

Her past work has focussed on political advertising on Meta’s platforms during the 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, and found that candidates mainly used their ads to promote themselves and emphasise party-specific political issues, but that research focussed mainly on textual content and now needs to be expanded to the multimodal aspects …

And the final speaker in our panel at the Social Media & Society conference is Risto Kunelius himself, focussing particularly on the loss and damage community which also emerged from our practice mapping of the COP27 climate summit Twitter data. COP27 instituted a Loss and Damage fund as a milestone outcome; this recognises the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities across countries, and emerges from a much longer debate about climate change responsibility and justice.

This project filtered the COP27 dataset for mentions of the loss and damage efforts, then, and explored the dominant (and absent) actors and content …

The next speaker in our panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is the great Barbara Pfetsch, whose focus is on the issue spaces represented in these datasets on COP26 and COP27. Climate change is of course a planetary issue, and how it is addressed is linked to the transnationalisation and translocalisation of digital public spheres; such practices show that space is socially constructed, as are perspectives of the geography of responsibility and impact, which leads to a kind of discursive geography. There is a need here, then, to map the attention economy of climate change.

COP …

I was the next speaker in this panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of the COP26 and COP27 summits through our practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:

We have one more paper session on the final day of the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, and it’s a panel coordinated by the great Risto Kunelius that I’m also presenting a paper in. This panel presents outcomes from the CLOUD-C project, which explored discussions around the COP26 (in 2021, which of course took place in Glasgow, too) and COP27 (in 2022, in Sharm El-Sheik) UN climate change summits from a number of perspectives.

Risto kicks us off by introducing the panel itself: data for the project were gathered from Twitter using a set of keywords related to …

I’m on 7% charge and only managed to blog the first paper in the final session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow today, which was presented by Sanna Malinen. Her focus is on platforms and censorship, and she notes that activists have increasingly needed to consider visibility-based platform algorithms in their work.

Such algorithms are increasingly shaping visibility rather than banning problematic content altogether; this enables platforms to continue to engage in data gathering and surveillance even when users and their content are made less visible. Such interventions reduce the ability of activists to use such platforms …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Carlos Entrena-Serrano and Tom Wright, whose interest is in TikTok creators’ response to the Trump government’s efforts to affect how TikTok works. Both Trump and Biden pushed for a change in ownership in TikTok’s US operations during their Presidencies; this has the potential to profoundly affect millions of users, especially if it ends up changing what content is promoted by the platform.

TikTok is now a sociotechnical assemblage that is deeply embedded into the lives of its many users; efforts to change how it …