Streaming Media

The second day of our P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference focusses on research methods, and starts with a presentation by the excellent Jessica Gabriele Walter. Her focus is on YouTube data donations. Conventional social media data access has been via platform APIs and third-party platform initiatives like Social Science One; an alternative to this are user-centric approaches like browser tracking or data donation, which is growing in prominence.

Such work is important because of the increase in media fragmentation and the growing importance of social media especially during times of crisis; but data access has been declining markedly …

The final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session for today starts with Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the political uses of TikTok. Here, she is focussing especially on the use of the platform by individual politicians in the last Queensland election – which continued even though there were increasing moves to ban the platform in Australia, especially by political actors.

Susan’s study explored the political uses by the past Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and new Premier Steven Miles (both Labor), and opposition leader David Crisafulli (LNP); their videos were analysed for their immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness; their …

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 …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Darian Harff, whose interest is in the political topics covered by social media influencers in Germany and Flanders. Social media influencers run popular social media accounts and have become well-known because of their content specialties, but some occasionally also address political topics. This can be consequential in affecting public opinion especially amongst younger audiences, but is also problematic because they often have no formal political expertise. Such influencers can therefore emerge as opinion leaders who curate political information.

What topics do such influencers cover, then? Are these issues of collective …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

But the social media ecosystem does not replicate the web ecosystem, and some news outlets are making better use of those ecosystems to attract audiences than others. Users’ choices of platforms, and news outlets’ choices in engaging with platforms, both affect the formation of platform used …

The next session of the ICA 2024 conference that I’m in starts with Christian Pipal, whose interest is in political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. He begins by noting the use of TikTok by the Austrian presidential candidate (and subsequently president) in Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, who both announced his candidacy there and posted the requisite dancing videos.

TikTok may be especially attractive to political candidates because of its younger audience profile, but is this dancing or talking politics? Candidates have explored some very different communicative styles that seem to work for them on this platform: comedic, documentary …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social …

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

Indeed, engagement with the Sweden Democrats’ social media activities is substantial; their accounts reach a large and especially young audience …

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with the wonderful Katrin Weller, who begins by noting that her institution, GESIS, is now also launching DP-REX, the Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research. But her talk is actually about assessing the impact of scientific impact through altmetric scores, with a particular focus on the engagement with scientific content that takes place in YouTube videos. The project uses data from Altmetric.com, who identified links to scientific articles in the descriptions of YouTube videos between 2006 and 2017.

The analysis conducted a manual coding of some …

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …