Social Media

And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the São Paulo mayoral elections in 2024. These were the first elections after the divisive 2022 federal election and 2023 coup attempt led by disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, and therefore also served as a kind of barometer for the political mood in the country.

Bruna’s interest here is in how this intersects with Meta’s stated policy to reduce the amount of political content made visible in its users’ Facebook, and later also Instagram, feeds; the …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Kajsa Falasca, whose focus is on TikTok engagement ahead of the upcoming Swedish election. TikTok analysis is complicated, and requires an attention to multimodal content; this study employed an approach called Multimodal Narrative Mapping, using a methodological approach which automatically scrolls through videos and analyses the content of the videos displayed.

In this sense, then, TikTok changes both the process of campaigning and the object of analysis: content served to users extends beyond the accounts that users themselves follow, and is also determined by what …

And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on political campaigning on Facebook in the Nordic countries. Social media are of course now used widely as a way of bypassing conventional media in campaign communication; this is particularly interesting for populist communicators.

European Parliament elections provide a useful case for comparative research, and the comparison of the Nordic EU countries Denmark, Finland, and Sweden is particularly interesting given their political similarities: parties rather than candidates tend to be the central political actors here; government …

And the post-lunch session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno today starts with Georgios Lappas, whose focus is on a comparative Facebook study of party agendas across Europe during the European Parliament elections. How are such agendas structured: by national contexts, or transnational European party alliances? And how do audiences respond to this, using Facebook’s affordances for reactions and responses? Does this differ by policy areas?

This study covered 21 EU countries, 141 political parties, and nearly 20,000 Facebook posts over the four weeks before election day; it considered 11 policy fields that were constructed …

The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Patrick Parschan, whose focus is on the use of ideal point estimation for the analysis of party positions in campaign tweets. There are various text scaling algorithms for the analysis of political positions in tweets on a left-right scale, in comparison with party manifestos, but unfortunately these often do not agree with each other.

Patrick approached this with data for US and German elections across several years, using party manifestos and tweet corpora. Existing approaches have tended to draw on word frequency …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is our host Martina Edr Novotná, who continues our focus on gender. Gender stereotypes create barriers for women in politics; they also align such women with issues that are perceived to be female-coded, and thereby limit their ability to engage in other topics. But evidence on such gendering remains inconsistent, as party affiliation and other aspects also intersect with such patterns.

This study, then, examined gender issue ownership on Facebook across some 18 countries in the DigiWorld research network. It focussed on national …

And the afternoon session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Maria José Ávalos Troncoso, whose focus is on women political candidates in Chile. Two of the eight candidates in the first round of the Chilean presidential elections in 2025 were women; one of them, Jara, made it to the run-off election against the eventual winner, Kast.

The question is, then, how she was treated during the election campaign; role congruity theory, gendered disinformation, platformised bias, and the continuum of political violence all predict that she would be treated differently from her opponent(s) because …

The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Delia Balaban, who shifts our focus to Romania. Romania has had some electoral turmoil as its 2024 presidential elections had to be annulled and repeated following massive Russian influence operations; but this also affected the 2024 parliamentary elections, which themselves were affected by scandals over dubious campaign funding.

Those controversies centred on TikTok, but Delia’s focus here is, to begin with, on the 2024 European Parliament elections on Facebook, which remains a key platform for political information and overall news in Romania …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on assessing polarisation amongst political leaders during election campaigns. The emphasis here is on affective, identity-based, and relational polarisation: the presentation of ‘us vs. them’ and sectarian in- and outgroup perspectives.

Computational methods might be valuable for this, but current methods do not fully capture this; they do not usually capture whom polarised language is directed against, and manual methods are commonly used instead. This paper develops this further, and applies this to a study …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Stephen Harrington, who begins by highlighting the importance of the attention economy in political communication; Donald Trump, for instance, is now also the Troll-in-Chief because he knows that even his most outlandish posts generate wall-to-wall media coverage.

But Trump himself can also be trolled, for instance by California governor Gavin Newsom, who has a dedicated communications team on Xitter, @GovPressOffice, that fights Trump’s fire with his own fire. This project scraped all of that account’s tweets, and categorised these as …