Social Media

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.

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 to remain undertheorised in political communication literature.

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 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.

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.

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.