Elections

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

Jan’s study is attempting to address this by observing developments in the Netherlands, combining data from Twitter and the mainstream media about the candidates’ own activities, responses to them, and coverage of their activities in the media …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Alex Hogan, whose focus is on the impact of online political communities in politics. There is still considerable debate on whether online action promotes or retards other forms of collective action offline; the recent rise of the 'alt-right' adds another chapter to this discussion.

'Alt-right' activists have made effective use of the Internet and especially of social media to organise and coordinate their activities, attack their enemies, and disseminate their propaganda and narratives. These activists exist largely outside of conventional conservative parties, and refute conventional political processes while supporting alternative, outsider …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Marco Bastos, whose focus is on the Brexit referendum. He notes that a substantial number of bots were active in the Brexit debate on Twitter, yet many of these accounts disappeared immediately after the referendum. But it is also important to distinguish between different bots: there are legitimate bot developers that offer such accounts, while genuine, highly active users are sometimes also misidentified as bots.

Many bots in the referendum have disappeared, then, as have many of the URLs they shared at the time; these can now no longer be …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Elizabeth Losh, whose interest is in the role of devices in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama was seen as associated with a broad range of constructive as well as destructive devices, from personal mobile phones to impersonal drones, while Donald Trump is associated mostly with the tweets sent from his mobile phone. But what about Hillary Clinton?

Clinton's digital practices, and those of her campaign staff, were greater factors in her electoral defeat than her gender, Liz suggests. There were considerable discussions and scandals about her use of personal …

The next speaker at AoIR 2017 is Olga Boichàk, who begins by highlighting the role of social media platforms in structuring specific forms of human sociality. But this also means that automated accounts – specifically, bots – can imitate and affect genuine human interactions in these spaces. What does this mean for online discussions in the context of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, then?

This project draws on the Illuminating 2016 research project that gathered some one billion social media messages, and focussed especially on major retweet events (where a candidate's message is widely retweeted by a substantial number of …

The second presenter in this AoIR 2017 session is Adrian Rauchfleisch, who begins by highlighting the highly combative and complex nature of the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Counterpublics played an important role here, too; new actors – especially on the right – were able to make their voices heard during the campaign, through some more established actors (Fox News, and Trump himself) also claimed not to be part of the mainstream.

At present, in fact, many right-wing movements around the world position themselves as counterpublics, and one of the key defining characteristics may be an exclusion, or at …

The second day at AoIR 2017 starts with a panel on the U.S. elections in 2016, and Patrícia Rossini is the first speaker. She notes the limited focus in the past on how voters interact with election campaigns; much of the research has paid attention simply to the campaigning strategies themselves. But there is also evidence that users encounter a good deal of campaigning in their social networks, though they do not necessarily like doing so – in part because the discourse can be heated, emotional, and uncivil. Further, reactions to some discourse differ based on whether users agree or …

The first keynote at AoIR 2017 is by Andrew Chadwick, who explores what the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign means for our understanding of the hybrid media system. Political communication is in the middle of a chaotic transitional period, due in good part to the disruptions brought by newer, digital media; some older media have also been renewed by integrating the logics of newer media. This then represents a systemic perspective that examines forces while they are in flow.

The hybrid media system is built on the interactions of older and newer media logics in the reflexively connected field of media …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Bernadine Jones, who takes us back to the 1994 South African 'miracle election', with a particular focus on global north television reporting of the election.

The early 1990s saw a shift in international news reporting, from Cold War 'us vs. them' reporting to neo-liberal narratives promoting transnational economic cooperation and development. The 1994 South African election provided the perfect opportunity for this framing. This links with wider understandings of media logics (such as personalisation and shallow, dramatised reporting) and mediatisation (especially the televisualisation of politics at the expense of …

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Shannon McGregor, whose interest is in the role of social media in the construction of public opinion by the political press. There's an increasing tendency for journalistic coverage to claim that 'Twitter' or even 'the Internet' responded in a particular way to specific political issues and controversies, and social media certainly play a role in how public opinion is shaped, but how might we think about the type of public opinion that can be observed on social media?

We are able, of course, to measure aspects like …