Social Media

The final presenter in this AoIR 2015 session is Luca Rossi, who shifts our attention to Italian politics. His interest moves beyond elections, too, as elections represent a very specific political moment. Internet and social media use in Italy is still relatively limited – in 2012, only 62% of the population were online, and the main source of information remains television.

At the same time, some 36% of Italian social media users engage in political debate – an unusually high number. This may be due in part to the substantial connections between mainstream media and the political establishment in Italy …

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Stuart Geiger, whose interest is in the collective block lists on Twitter that are developed by anti-harassment communities. This bypasses or sits alongside Twitter's own, 'official' anti-harassment (and anti-spam, etc.) efforts.

Stuart's own work began with Wikipedia, which has has a set of complex internal governance mechanisms and is increasingly using automated bots to militate against vandalism and other disruptions. Such bots are a form of bespoke code that is separate from but interacts with the sovereign, governmental code that underlies the Wikipedia platform itself.

Much of this became …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.

Online campaigns have been studied for several years, and a general finding is that incumbents employ more position-taking strategies, while challengers operate more often in attack mode. This may play out on Twitter slightly differently because of the …

The first presenter at AoIR 2015 this morning is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in the Twitter response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Very quickly, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie emerged to express sympathy and support for the magazine; a negative #JeNeSuisPasCharlie also emerged, however, to critique the magazine's actions. Fabio's interest here is in how this hashtag was discursively positioned.

There were some 74,000 tweets by 41,000 unique users with the negative hashtag, between 7 and 11 January 2015, and Fabio's team used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyse them. They followed the method developed by Stefan Stieglitz and me to …

Up next at AoIR 2015 is the fabulous Luca Rossi, whose interest is in how scientific media events are now mediated via Twitter. His focus here is on the Rosetta mission and the Philae probe's landing on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission was launched before Twitter was, but the approach and landing of the probe was covered closely by dedicated Twitter accounts and in widely promoted hashtags like #WakeUpRosetta.

This created a great deal of awareness and anticipation, and Luca's project gathered some 400,000 tweets related to the relevant hashtags. Using the approach for classifying hashtags that Stefan Stieglitz and …