Elections

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

These stories are what can be understood as Euromyths, representing a second-order semiological system …

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst …

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.

What is the role of Instagram in Germany in this context, then, especially in the context of the 2017 federal and state elections? How do …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Pablo Jost, who begins by discussing the limitations of surveys (expensive, reactive, increasingly unable to reach representative panels of participants) and raises the question of whether digital trace data may be able to be used as an alternative. Twitter might be a poor substitute, as it remains an elite medium in many countries; Facebook use, however, is far more widespread, and could therefore be seen as considerably less inherently biased.

The present project sampled news media posts on Facebook in the lead-up to the 2017 German federal election, and in these …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Alexandre Borrell, whose focus is on references to ‘the people’ in political rhetoric in the past two French presidential elections. Are such references used similarly by candidates from different political camps, or do left- and right-wing candidates use them differently? The study used official posters, statements, and TV ads from the campaigns to analyse this.

Reference to the people is common for the campaigns of the far-right Front National under both Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, as well as for the populist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of Front de Gauche. Not a …

The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

What is interesting about Jenna Abrams ‘her’-self is the creation of a distinct persona and mode of self-presentation; this account represents an interpersonal mode of disinformation. This is a form of the authenticity work which is also common to the online persona construction by ordinary users, strategic actors …

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …