Social Media

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko M. Skoric, whose interest is in incidental exposure to political information on social media. The present study is especially interested in exposure to people of different religions, from the perspective of Pakistani users. Such exposure is also critical to the avoidance of ‘echo chambers’, of course – but the context of such exposure also matters, of course: for instance with respect to the (in)civility of the content that is encountered.

In Pakistan, exposure to pro-minority content on social media might be in the context of music, sports, or movies, for …

The final paper in this short session at IAMCR 2023 is Sofia P. Caldeira, who is exploring the imaginaries of feminist activism on Instagram. Digital and social media platforms are essential for everyday encounters with feminism, which exists on these platforms side-by-side with interpersonal and entertainment uses. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with a particular emphasis on visual aesthetics and its own cultures of use – what feminist imaginaries does it enable and support?

The present study examined feminist cultures on Instagram in Portuguese between 2021 and 2023, by following a number of feminist hashtags …

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

This divergence can be captured by examining the change in political rhetoric following the invasion. The key aspect to examine here is sympathy, which is itself the foundation for solidarity and moral …

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

In addition, social media platforms are interactive, and ordinary users can create their own content online; they engage in many-to-many communication, also with state media accounts. State propaganda is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

Institutions are seen as durable, multifaceted social structures that are socially constructed and therefore subject to change; the people are variously constructed by populist or nationalist …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa. Science journalism is a specialised form of journalists covering science, medicine, and technology, and has gained particular prominence especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; the pandemic has also exposed the value-laden aspects of science journalism, however, pointing to the centrality of politics in the scientific enterprise in the post-war era and the predominant Global North perspectives embraced by science journalism. This does not necessarily serve countries like South Africa well.

The present study examined the …

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping. The net effect is potentially the end of the mass audience for the news.

The present project, then, explored the Instagram pages of some 662 global news publishers from 50 …

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

It is possible to distinguish between different actors in this, though: innovators, early adopters, and followers; as well as politicians …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

The present paper examined the Facebook posts from both parties in January to March 2023, drawing on some 240-280 posts from each party. For Vox, these featured (in order of importance) anti-minority (including migrants as well as women …

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

This project examined the Brazilian and Danish elections of 2022, with particular focus on the leading contenders in each election: Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, and Ellemann-Jensen and Frederiksen in Denmark. We collected the Facebook posts by these leaders, using CrowdTangle, and engaged in a manual coding (by a Brazilian and a Dane) of these posts …