Twitter Campaigns in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

The next ECREA 2012 speakers are Hallvard Moe and Anders Larsson, who compare social media use in the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish elections. They begin by noting that social media, and specific platforms, are deeply integrated with each other and with the wider mediasphere, and that this raises questions over the genres of use for each of these platforms, and the key actors which emerge in each case.

The three countries examined by the project are similar in their political systems and structures, and the project examined the use of Twitter during their campaigns; in particular, it explored the use of links to external Web resources in the hashtags associated with each election campaign. The vast majority of such links pointed to traditional news sites (between 35 and 40%); alternative media were present only in Norway, and even there represented less than ten per cent of all links (most of these pointed to a site which publishes Norwegian political news in languages other than Norwegian). Online-only media were also largely absent, generally accounting for less than five per cent.

Web 2.0 sites were represented in the links mainly in the form of video and photo sharing sites; photo sharing was especially prominent in Denmark, where photos of defaced election posters were popular; in Sweden, a controversial extreme right wing video was widely linked to. Blogs were also widely linked to, especially in Denmark – but this was due mainly to a series of spam blogs which posted embarrassing videos of leftist politicians. Links to Facebook pages also occurred, through at a low level, and mainly pointed to the Facebook pages of politicians and parties.

Links, then, mainly point to established societal actors. Twitter communication overall is still quite limited in these cases, which also makes it easy for individual actors to stand out; mainstream media remain most influential overall, and it is now important to investigate how social media activities are reflected in such mainstream media as well.