Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg, whose focus is on references to co-morbidities in discussions of COVID-19: much of the rhetoric here implied that the death of some disabled people as a result of COVID-19 was simply a fact of life that was to be accepted. Disability studies have long shown that disability is often stigmatised as a form of abnormality; this is tied to capitalist logics, and often leads to the marginalisation and infantilisation of disability – positioning disability a as form of deviancy.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Tuomas Heikkilä and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in pseudoanonymous communicators during the COVID-19 crisis. These users use semi-stable pseudonyms, so they are neither identifiable nor fully anonymous, and the present study explored their role in political debate around the pandemic. This builds on the theory of connective action: organised communication without the presence of a central organisation coordinating activities. This can be more personal, more scalable, and more rapid.

The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Vivian Gerrand, whose focus is on alternative narratives that may be used to disrupt the misogynist manosphere and counter violent extremism (CVE). This is not only an online task, as such networks also extend into the offline space, and it must address both push and pull factors.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Debbie Ging, whose focus is on Incel ideology online. Incels are men who believe themselves to be unfairly disadvantaged in then sexual marketplace, leading them to extremely misogynist ideation and sometimes action, with links to broader alt-right and far-right ideologies.

It’s Friday morning, and the warm glow of being at an in-person AoIR 2022 conference still hasn’t worn off yet. I’m starting with the session on radicalisation, and the first paper is by Diana Zulli and Marcus Mann. They’re interested in early-stage radicalisation, which has been studied in offline and online contexts for some time already. This involves the radicalisation of beliefs, but also social processes of connection, and both are motivated by the search for significance and the development of new social networks.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Giovanni Daniele Starita, whose focus is on the endemic populist nature of political discourse, especially in digital spheres, in Italy. Not all Italian politicans are populist, but they all seem to ‘do’ populism – well beyond typical actors such as Berlusconi, Grillo, and Salvini.

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals.

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists.