Social Media

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicholas Holm, whose interest is in the role of fun in the public sphere. In political communication, in fact, humour and laughter often appears out of place; in recent times, however, some playful and humorous elements have come to intrude into political discourse. How can we make sense of this?

It’s been a busy week, but we’ve reached the final session of the IAMCR 2024 conference in Christchurch, which begins with a paper by Samiksha Koirala and Soumik Pal on the use of social media in political campaigning in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. They begin by noting the domination of South Asian politics by long-lived political dynasties; however, the emergence of social media as a campaigning space has begun to disrupt such structures.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

The final IAMCR 2024 session for today is in disinformation and polarisation, and starts with Ivan Paganotti’s presentation on institutional communication by the leading candidates’ campaign Websites in the 2022 Brazilian election. In particular, he is interested in whether and how they tried to respond to electoral disinformation, and whether they had policies to curtail such disinformation once in office.

And the final speaker in this full session at IAMCR 2024 is Dorismilda Flores-Márquez, who shifts our focus to the presidential campaign in Mexico. This was the first time the election was a contest between two women candidates – a major step in the country.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Jintao Zhang, whose interest is in the Chinese government’s social media crisis response to the Zhengzhou rainstorm. This occurred in July 2021, and resulted in substantial damage and loss of life.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiting Tong, whose interest is in the rhetorical and political community JianZheng in China. She begins with a metaphor of biological community organisms like the Aspen trees in Utah, which are connected by their roots and form one large organism.

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Zaneera Malik, whose focus is on the use of social media as a strategic political communication tool in the fragile democracy of Pakistan. The focus here is especially on the PTI party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, which lost the February 2024 election.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yuan Zeng, whose interest is in the tactical uses of social media and their platform affordances by young people in China. This is especially against the backdrop of the ‘zero-COVID’ lockdown in China in 2022.