Elections

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

Generation Z voters, in particular, will have no previous voting experience, and are highly influenced by information from social media; but they remain highly underresearched in Indonesia, especially with respect to their communication and political participation. They also grew up during …

The third speaker in this session at COMNEWS 2023 is Olivia Lewi Pramesti, whose interest is in hoaxes ahead of the 2024 Indonesian election. The volume of misinformation is expected to increase substantially during this time, and digital literacy in Indonesia has not kept track with this growth in problematic information; social media are being used substantially for storytelling, and have considerable influence on public opinion. How can local media push back against this?

The policies of media outlets have an important role to play in facilitating the fight against mis- and disinformation. This project used interviews with newsroom staff …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

This paper focusses on political branding ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Indonesia, focussing on the presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo; a hashtag related to him, #ganjarpresiden2024, has emerged as the most prominent …

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

Different political figures have very divergent approaches to communication even on the same platforms; this paper focusses on …

The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.

These issues were brought to the forefront again during the imprisonment of former president Lula da Silva and the presidency of former soldier Jair Bolsonaro, which emboldened military leaders to involve themselves …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, who also works with the URL shares dataset provided by Facebook via Social Science One. He also utilises the generative artificial intelligence tools now provided by OpenAI in order to examine the themes of and partisan attention to the topics circulating in discourse surrounding the 2018 and 2022 Italian election campaigns.

The URL shares dataset is centred on users’ engagement with URLs, and contains some random Gaussian noise designed to prevent the re-identifiability of users. The present project extracted the title and description of political URLs mainly …

Next up in our AoIR 2023 session is the wonderful Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on understanding the processes that led to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the United States. She builds on an analysis of every Facebook and Twitter post and Facebook and Instagram ad by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and focusses here especially on Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election.

One of his key points of focus was on mail-in ballots (which were especially common in the 2020 election as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), questioning the validity of such ballots and …