Social Media

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session on alternative media is Pablo Porten-Cheé, whose focus is on countering misinformation with narratives. He begins with an example of the public discourse in Slovakia about the Roma community. Dominant, prejudiced views circulate, but are also countered by some engaged users – yet such correctives may not be particularly effective if they are only using facts and are directed at little-engaged audiences; responses that take a more personal and affective narrative approach may be more powerful.

How can this effect of personal stories be explained? The underlying theory here is …

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.

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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …

The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).

This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the …

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 …