Social Media

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The literature so far tells us that Facebook appears to be used especially for international connections between different political actors, and for sharing mainstream and alternative news; on Twitter there are denser networks within countries or language spaces, which are …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to this are also alternative news media sites that present their own views as a corrective to the mainstream. In Germany, these are deeply rooted in right-wing and populist communities, and are supportive of counter-hegemonic attitudes, including to COVID-19 containment measures. But the alternative media spectrum is complex: there is a continuum of outlets from mainstream-style outlets (via people who also …

It’s Saturday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’ve arrived a little too late to see the start of the session on online counterpublics, where Kilian Bühling is already in the middle of his presentation on German counterpublics on Telegram in the context of COVID-19.

The study explored what media content and media actors are being referenced in such counterpublics, and shows a considerable presence of political right-wing and radical (Querdenker) actors, but also that these developments ands their underlying ecosystem are not uniform. Distinct ecosystems are getting established here: both internal and external to Telegram. And there is a …

The final ECREA 2022 session for today starts with Soyeon Jin, whose focus is on the European immigration debate. She notes that Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration have improved over the years, yet there also seems to be an increasing amount of controversial debate around; what is going on here? Traditional assumptions are that more negative sentiment produces more negative messages on social media, but this may not be the only dynamic here; people with more extreme views may simply have become more active in their social media posting, too.

To further explore this, Soyeon’s work focusses on reaction buttons on …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was …

The third speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Delia Dumitrica, whose focus is on political humour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her project investigated the representation of politicians in such humour as an expression of trust in politics, across Estonia, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Romania, working with data from digital media during the March to July 2020 period.

Much of this political humour was directed at national political actors, COVID-19 policies, and national institutions; less so at the polity, international political actors, and others. Some of this was poking innocuous fun about the political authority that …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Qinfeng Zhu, whose focus is in political talk in WhatsApp groups. This refers not to formal political deliberation, but to everyday political conversations in third spaces online: it is informal, spontaneous, sociable, and outside the realm of formal political discussion. Such casual political talk can be beneficial for democracy as the stakes are lower and the participants are ordinary citizens, but can also be complicated as it emerges in arenas that are less socially grounded where the rules of engagement are less clear. This also means that such political talk, when …

The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides:

The next ECREA 2022 session is on the dissemination of genuine and problematic news, and I’m involved in two of the papers being presented. We start with Bradley Wiggins, whose focus is on conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board.

The data for this work were collected by the DMI 4CAT tool, using terms such as ‘steal’ and ‘Trump’ during 3-9 January 2021. This is part of a larger spike in 4chan activity that commence from November 2021, during and after the US presidential election. Bradley also points out that Trump has a long history of cozying up with the …