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Snurb — Friday 28 June 2024 00:06

A Framework for Data Donations from YouTube Users

'Big Data' | Social Media | Streaming Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The second day of our P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference focusses on research methods, and starts with a presentation by the excellent Jessica Gabriele Walter. Her focus is on YouTube data donations. Conventional social media data access has been via platform APIs and third-party platform initiatives like Social Science One; an alternative to this are user-centric approaches like browser tracking or data donation, which is growing in prominence.

Such work is important because of the increase in media fragmentation and the growing importance of social media especially during times of crisis; but data access has been declining markedly …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 22:07

Approaching the Phenomenon of 'Dark Political Communication'

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The final presenters at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference this evening are my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Tim Graham, presenting a pilot project leading into a larger research project on ‘dark political communication’: expanding from a narrow focus on disinformation to examine the problematic communication strategies of political elites for political gain. One strategy in such communication is disinformative attacks: here, political actors make specific false claims regarding their political opponents, and manage to get these covered by journalists because journalism has a negativity bias, conflict bias, and/or an immediacy and timeliness bias. Such attacks seem …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 22:02

Trumpism in the Online Sinosphere‽

Politics | Elections | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Jing Zeng, whose focus is on Trumpism in the online Sinosphere. There was a lot of public animosity between presidents Trump and Xi during Trump’s term in office, but there also appears to be a surprising amount of support for Trump both within China as well as in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Chinese-Americans were one of the groups of Asian-Americans with the greatest amount of support for Trump, in fact.

The e-commerce platform Taobao sells Buddha figures with Trump’s face, for example; such …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 22:00

The Strange Performances of Queensland State Politicians on TikTok

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Streaming Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session for today starts with Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the political uses of TikTok. Here, she is focussing especially on the use of the platform by individual politicians in the last Queensland election – which continued even though there were increasing moves to ban the platform in Australia, especially by political actors.

Susan’s study explored the political uses by the past Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and new Premier Steven Miles (both Labor), and opposition leader David Crisafulli (LNP); their videos were analysed for their immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness; their …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:58

New Approaches to Studying Hybrid Information Sourcing Practices

Politics | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Henri Mütschele, whose focus is on the interplay between traditional and social media in positional polarisation. What are the opinion dynamics in networked publics? This project focusses on positional or ideological polarisation, two concepts which are often used synonymously, and sees polarisation as a process in which positional distances between two entities are growing.

Such polarisation need not be symmetrical between the groups involved, and can be measured along two dimensions: along a left-right political scale and along a GAL-TAN scale that examines the political values of …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:54

Analysing Hizbullah Propaganda Strategies on Telegram and TV

Politics | Government | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference | Television |

And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:52

Interconnections between Problematic Information and Polarisation

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Giada Marino, presenting outcomes from the Italian I-POLHYS project led by Laura Iannelli which researched polarisation in hybrid media’s systems. A key focus of the project was on the potential interconnections between problematic information and mass polarisation; it began with a systematic literature review on these connections, which focussed on some 68 relevant articles (out of a much larger number that used these terms as buzzwords but did not operationalise them in any rigorous way, or confused them with other concepts) …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:49

Mapping the Literature on Populism

Politics | Polarisation | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The next speakers at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard and Samantha Vilkins, presenting the emerging findings from an ongoing literature review of the concept of populism, continuing on from our review of the polarisation concept. Contrary to polarisation, populism is rather more clearly defined, with works by Mudde and Laclau emerging as particularly central if somewhat competing definitions.

These variously define populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde) and discursive opposition between the elites and the people (Laclau); such definitions have been applied to populist phenomena in media, medicine, religion, and other …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:45

Tech Firms and Their Poor Performance as Democratic Gatekeepers

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

The third speaker in this opening plenary at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the great Daniel Kreiss, who shifts our focus to the role of tech firms in the context of democratic challenges. They may be seen as ‘democratic gatekeepers’, potentially playing a crucial role in keeping anti-democratic leaders and parties from power. Democracies are saved when there are strong political institutions to save them, but these institutions need to include media organisations and platforms as well.

Journalists are ‘civil gatekeepers’, then, who communicate ideas to the public about what is and is not democratic; when …

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Snurb — Wednesday 26 June 2024 21:42

Defining the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | P³ ICA 2024 Postconference |

I’ve stepped in as the presenter of the second paper in this opening session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference – unfortunately my colleague Katharina Esau, who was meant to present today, has fallen ill. The work we are presenting here is one of the early conceptual outcomes of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship on partisanship and polarisation, and both explores the concept of polarisation as current literature from a variety of fields describes it, and outlines five key symptoms of what we define as destructive polarisation that require further scholarly attention and empirical analysis.

Breaking Points …
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