Elections

The next speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Martin Nkosi Ndlela, who is also a contributor to our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. He shifts our focus to the use of social media in Kenyan elections. What are the democratic implications of rapid change in media systems in developing nations such as this, and what effect do new media have on civic engagement?

How were social media used in the political campaigning process in the 2013 election campaign in Kenya, then? This must also be understood against the context of previous elections in the country, which …

The first morning at ECREA 2016 starts with a session that celebrates the launch of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, and begins with a paper by my co-editor Gunn Enli. Her interest is in the question of authenticity: this has become a big theme in advertising for just about any product or service, also including politics. This may be seen as a response to the artificial aspects of the postmodern world.

The more artificial ands focus group-tested political messaging becomes, the more the idea of authenticity has come to the fore. Such authenticity has been approached …

We start the second session this morning at AoIR 2016 with a paper by Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Patricia Rossini, whose interest is in the social media posts of presidential candidates in the U.S. election campaign in 2016. On their live tracker they are capturing the social media activities of both Clinton and Trump, and these have also been coded by content.

One important aspect of this work is also to connect social media activities and public opinion polling. This provides additional context for online campaigns, and shows the interrelations between social media campaigning activities and current polling performance. In a …

The next speaker at Social Media and Society is Christopher Mascaro, whose interest is in 'big data' on political communication online. Political discourse studies have traditionally been restrained by geographic and social access, and 'big data' from online activities can overcome some of these barriers; it also introduces some new limitations that must be considered, however.

Christopher's focus is on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election: how do networks form around the political issues being discussed on Twitter during the campaign? The dataset was generated using TwitterZombie running on Amazon Web Services, tracking an extensible range of hashtags, user handles, and …

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.

Online campaigns have been studied for several years, and a general finding is that incumbents employ more position-taking strategies, while challengers operate more often in attack mode. This may play out on Twitter slightly differently because of the …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The team used live coding and dynamic keyword management during the debate, to capture as much as possible of the Twitter discussion around the debates. This resulted in 427 linguistic rules capturing some 33m tweets from 5.4m users, of which some 51% were retweets.

Audiences and journalists …