Elections

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 panel is Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on the developments of online political communication in Sweden – this covers the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. His focus is especially on the rise of populism in Swedish politics, and the platformisation of messaging in election campaigns.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Jakob Linaa Jensen, who focusses on the Danish political environment. He and his colleagues conducted surveys amongst Internet users in four Danish election campaigns (2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019) to examine their experiences with the role of social media in national elections. Denmark has a multi-party system, and Facebook is clearly the leading social media platform here.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the fabulous Jenny Stromer-Galley, who shifts our focus to 2014 and 2018 gubernatorial campaigns in the United States. She begins by noting the significant growth in negative advertising in U.S. elections, and this increase may also have led to a gradual decline in voter turnout as well as a general mistrust of political and democratic institutions.

The next session at AoIR 2019 starts with our paper on Twitter activity patterns in the 2019 Australian federal election, and I presented the first part of this so I didn’t blog it, but the slides are below.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Emma Baulch, who shifts our focus to Indonesian activist uses of WhatsApp. She focusses on ‘buzzers’: content creators who work especially in the context of Indonesian election campaigns and promote specific political candidates across various social media platforms.

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brigitte Huber; her interest is in the motivations for engaging in politics. Such participation might be explained by demographics, political knowledge, news use and other factors, but also by inherent personality traits.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Vanessa Cortez, whose focus is on hate speech in the recent presidential election in Brazil. This election was marked by increasing polarisation and hate speech, and to study this the project gathered content around the election itself.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?