The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was …

The third presentation in this ECREA 2022 session is by Uta Rußmann, and examined the Facebook pages of political parties in the 2019 European elections. It focusses especially on the visual practices of such pages. User engagement with such content can shape political discourse, as it affects the visibility of the content on Facebook due to the platform’s algorithmic logics; parties actively adjust their social media practices to generate such engagement, of course. Negative statements, humour, personalised content, and populist statements are all seen as increasing engagement – as is multimedia content.

Visual forms are strongly connected with everyday political …

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this …