Social Media

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by Queensland state politicians in the lead-up to the October 2024 election. Even in spite of moves to ban TikTok in government departments and at the federal level for security reasons, candidates have been active on TikTok, and have been using it to build an ‘authentic’ personal brand – which requires immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting our work on the discussions of the 2022 Qatar World Cup by online football communities (slides are below). This draws on the theory of third spaces: primarily apolitical spaces where political talk can emerge and often takes place in a more congenial, respectful manner. This means they have democratic potential: discussion there may be able to avoid political disagreement and the avoidance of political talk.

We apply this concept to the case of the Qatar World Cup, which was highly controversial for the Qatari regime’s dismissive approach to overall human and specific minority rights; we gathered posts and comments from domestic football fan groups on Facebook in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Danish to examine how they addressed the Qatar World Cup and its many political controversies.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Hong Li, whose interest is in ‘grey actors’ in online public opinion. The case study here is the ‘Internet water army’: a group of users who are paid to post online comments on Chinese social media platforms in order to promote vested interests. This is an astroturfing effort for public relations and media manipulation, and has become a major social media industry in China.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nazira Bairbek, whose focus is on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Kazakhstan; some Russian users in Kazakhstan responded to the invasion by asking Putin to annex Kazakhstan as well, for instance, while many Kazakh people took the side of Ukraine and feared Russian aggression against their own country.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Caixie Tu, whose interest is in Hong Kong residents’ discussions about government ordinances on social media. The key question here is who speaks out on social media, and for what reasons.

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Liu Youmeng, whose interest is also in the impact of social media on affective polarisation in the Chinese public sphere. Indeed, high-choice media environments may generally increase affective polarisation, and selective exposure to pro-attitudinal content may have a significant role to play here. Individuals’ perceptions about the underlying opinion climate may also affect this, however.

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Yuan Zhong, whose interest is in the impact of social media affordances on polarisation. This addresses the lack of cross-platform studies on polarisation in platforms, as well as the lack of work on non-western political contexts; the project therefore examines five controversial debates on three Chinese social media platforms.

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Juan Antonio Guevara, whose interest is in polarisation in the 2023 Spanish general elections. His focus here is especially in affective polarisation, which can mean different things depending on how the idea is conceptualised. Here, polarisation is approached through a ‘fuzzy-set’ approach drawn from mathematics.

The Wednesday at IAMCR 2024 starts with a paper by Yiming Liu, whose interest is in the interplay between moralised discussion and group polarisation. She begins by noting that deliberation within a structured moral framework can effectively reduce polarisation; morality can therefore be part of the solution to group polarisation.