Blog

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Qinfeng Zhu, whose focus is in political talk in WhatsApp groups. This refers not to formal political deliberation, but to everyday political conversations in third spaces online: it is informal, spontaneous, sociable, and outside the realm of formal political discussion. Such casual political talk can be beneficial for democracy as the stakes are lower and the participants are ordinary citizens, but can also be complicated as it emerges in arenas that are less socially grounded where the rules of engagement are less clear. This also means that such political talk, when …

The next session at ECREA 2022 starts with a paper by Gitte Stald, who begins by introducing the notion of sustainable democracy; this concept had ecological overtones before, but more lately we’ve also begun to speak more generally about how to sustain democracy itself – and that may also need innovation to democracy itself. This question is often addressed from a systemic and government perspective, but it is critical to also take into account the citizen perspective, of course.

This research then sits at the nexus between informed citizenship, participation, democratic self-confidence, and trust in information as well as the …

The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Carlos Ballesteros, whose focus is on news games as a vehicle for digital journalism. Such news games have been around for some time, but they exist in many different forms, and there’s still a lack of conceptual clarity with respect to this term. The general hope is that such games might increase the amount of time people spend with the news media.

But how are such games used to convey journalistic messages? Carlos examined some 84 news games from 48 mass media outlets in 17 countries, classifying these across a number …

The next ECREA 2022 session is on the dissemination of genuine and problematic news, and I’m involved in two of the papers being presented. We start with Bradley Wiggins, whose focus is on conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board.

The data for this work were collected by the DMI 4CAT tool, using terms such as ‘steal’ and ‘Trump’ during 3-9 January 2021. This is part of a larger spike in 4chan activity that commence from November 2021, during and after the US presidential election. Bradley also points out that Trump has a long history of cozying up with the …

The final speakers in this ECREA 2022 session are Bradley Wiggins and Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, whose focus is on QAnon. Bradley describes this as “a new American religion”, but also points out that it has elements of a LARP (live action role play); it gamifies increasingly violent insurrection. From the US this also reaches elsewhere, for instance with the Reichsbürger in Germany and other groups in Canada, Russia, and elsewhere.

This is done also through memes, and in a sense such memes constitute organisations: they are a cultural replicator that construct organisations as their survival machines. For instance, the development of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Martin Lundqvist, whose interest is in the use of memes in the Northern Ireland conflict, where riots continue to occur with ‘monotonous regularity’, as a local judge recently pointed out. How do online memes engage with these continuing troubles? While we know much about meme culture overall, there is considerably less research on their role in such contexts of continuing post-war violence. Can they also speak to peace-building processes?

While the Northern Ireland peace process has progressed considerably, there are still deep divisions and significant segregation between the two communities. In …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat, whose interest is in digital protest cultures on TikTok, or in what he calls the overspilt public sphere. TikTok has become considerably more important in recent years, and this has had some interesting consequences; in Russia, for instance, TikTok now limits its content to Russian-made material, and Russian youth are actively seeking to circumvent such restrictions.

The Russian media environment is complicated and hostile, with comprehensive state capture of almost all media outlets and outright censorship of reporting on the Ukraine war. But social media have proved much …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 is Robert Topinka, whose interest is in reactionary digital cultures in the ‘post-pandemic’ environment. He is also releasing a report on this work. Such reactionary politics in the context of COVID-19 largely involves the rejection of the general consensus, and a call to take control of your own body. This is linked with far-right body culture, and any debunking and criticism from the mainstream just ends up reinforcing the message.

Instead of tracking extremist content to label it as disinformation and debunk it, there is therefore a need to understand how people drift …