Government

After a brief excursion to Helsinki for a workshop and a guest lecture, I have made my way to Ljubljana for the great biennial European communication conference, ECREA 2024. After the opening ceremony and a pipe organ performance (!) of Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers”, we start now with a keynote by Vesna Leskošek, addressing the conference theme of ‘communication and social (dis)order’.

She begins by introducing the idea of the welfare state, as a concept that may be in decline in the present time. But the welfare state maintains social order, social structures, and social institutions; it was one …

And my own paper on ten years of the #auspol hashtag on Twitter is next at Social Media & Society 2024. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

Elite and mass polarisation have similar dynamics, and may be related to each other; mass polarisation is often measured on a simple left-right political scale, but in multiparty systems can be better assessed within a cognitive political network framework, where respondents assess the interrelationships between the various parties and thereby produce …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

As public health threats rise in a given area, does social media activity by and engagement with health agencies follow? Two dynamics could be present here: there may be more activity …

The next session at Social Media & Society 2024 starts with Leiyuan Tian, who is interested in pro-China influencers on Twitter. These practice a kind of grey propaganda, part of the overall network of Chinese public diplomacy but not formally representing the Chinese government. How do such influencers present themselves, and what persuasive frames do they employ?

The project conducted a snowball sampling to identify some 20 such Twitter accounts, and examined their profiles and a selection of 300 tweets per account between February 2022 and 2023. Key self-presentation strategies and self-images that emerged from this included authenticity (as cultural …