Twitter

We’re into the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno, and I’ll be the final presenter (with slides coming soon). We start, though, with Jan Křovák, whose focus is on populism in the 2025 German and Czech elections.

He begins by describing populism as a communication strategy which is anti-elite and against out-groups, and which has become more mainstream in recent years – mainstream parties confronted by populist challengers have increasingly adopted populist rhetoric, while populist parties themselves have also become more mainstream in their electoral appeal.

This has played out very differently in …

The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Patrick Parschan, whose focus is on the use of ideal point estimation for the analysis of party positions in campaign tweets. There are various text scaling algorithms for the analysis of political positions in tweets on a left-right scale, in comparison with party manifestos, but unfortunately these often do not agree with each other.

Patrick approached this with data for US and German elections across several years, using party manifestos and tweet corpora. Existing approaches have tended to draw on word frequency …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Stephen Harrington, who begins by highlighting the importance of the attention economy in political communication; Donald Trump, for instance, is now also the Troll-in-Chief because he knows that even his most outlandish posts generate wall-to-wall media coverage.

But Trump himself can also be trolled, for instance by California governor Gavin Newsom, who has a dedicated communications team on Xitter, @GovPressOffice, that fights Trump’s fire with his own fire. This project scraped all of that account’s tweets, and categorised these as …

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 …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Javier Amores, whose focus is on toxicity, hate speech, and engagement in Spanish parties’ tweets about gender and sexuality. Sexual and gender identity, sexual freedom, and related topics have been a matter of considerable debate in Spain, even though Spain has made great advances in liberalisation and inclusivity in recent years; there is a need to examine how this has affected how parties communicate about these issues on social media platforms, and what engagement this produces.

This project explores this for tweets between 2015 and 2023 …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Calvin Yixiang Cheng, whose focus is on conspiracy theories on social media. These often persist for a very long time, and in their diffusion change their linguistic forms. Such content change may in fact aid in their persistence.

This study examines such language mutation. It works with Twitter data from 2020-22, collecting tweets which match keywords from major fact-checking sources to identify relevant conspiracist posts, and clustered those posts based on the fact-checking information that debunks them. It also identified the shortest possible …