Social Media

The second day at IAMCR 2024 starts with Jingxuan Gao, whose interest is in news on Weibo. She describes this as the newsification of social media, as the platform is becoming more important as a source of news for Chinese users. Weibo is broadly similar to Twitter, with some 598 million monthly active users.

Central to Weibo is Weibo Hot Search, which offers a list of trending topics on the platform and often packages entertainment information and soft news into a form of more serious news – newsifying them. This can be linked to the concept of infotainment, and may …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

From this perspective, elite narratives from one or another side of politics can influence media narratives, and this in turn influences public narratives; there is therefore likely to be a narrative competition between elites as they seek …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days …

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

It’s an early Monday in Christchurch, which means I must be at IAMCR 2024. I’ll present later in this session, but we begin this session with Linda Kong, whose focus is on the short-video addiction of rural Chinese elders. Young people in China are in fact worried about the substantial increase in the short video watching by elderly Chinese, and there even concerns about short-video addiction.

However, current research is unclear on such addictive patterns; it does not generally focus on Chinese or elderly users, much less both. In China, this is complicated by the traditional culture of filial …

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system …

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.

Italy has a multi-party political system with a variety of parties. The 2018 election was won by the populist Five Star Movement, governing together with the far-right Lega. In 2022, a coalition of right-wing and far-right parties …

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

There are 461 MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, of whom 20% are women; there is …

The post-lunch session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose interest is in measuring polarising discourses during election campaigns. Tariq and the team have developed a method to measure polarisation at the level of specific discourses: it is rooted in core principles and operationalised approaches that are adaptable to other contexts. Measuring polarisation at the discourse level is important; so far, so much of the work on polarisation has been done using surveys on self-reported political positioning or feelings towards leaders or parties, or has drawn on voting patterns …

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider …