Facebook

The next session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Anita Bonetti, whose focus is on in civility on social media platforms. Such in civility can be strategic in hybrid media systems: incivil content can go viral, and be picked up and amplified by mainstream media outlets. Incivility has been studied increasingly in recent years, but we still lack a longitudinal and comparative perspective. This paper explores this for the Italian political context.

This study works with posts on Facebook by Italian political parties during the 2014, 2019, and 2024 EU and 2018 and …

And the final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Mārtiņš Pričins, whose focus is on the campaigning of Latvian political parties on Facebook, comparing in particular the 2024 European parliamentary election and the 2026 Latvian national election.

The focus here is also especially on visual communication, and the potentially diverging campaigning styles of new political parties. Facebook (and YouTube) remain the top social media platforms in Latvia, and social media are now also a premier source of news and political information for Latvian users; the overall volume of posting has …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Alban Zeneli, whose focus is on the 2025 elections in Kosovo. Kosovo remains a region in transition, and political campaigning might unfold differently here; the focus of the present paper, then, is on how parties used Facebook and Instagram in their campaigning.

Kosovo’s political instability meant that it had two national elections in 2025, in February and December; populist politics (characterised by people-centrism, anti-elitism, and exclusionary tendencies towards minority others) played a significant role here, and were expressed also through visual communication.

The present project …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Melanie Magin, whose interest is in the campaigning strategies of Nordic political parties in comparison to the rest of Europe; this, then, takes a very broad approach which explores similarities and differences within and between geographical regions. The background to this are the various countries’ political communication systems, using the nation state as the core unit of analysis.

The three Nordic EU member states (Denmark, Sweden, Finland) have relatively similar political communication systems, also including strong public broadcasters and a highly consensus-focussed, restrained, and information-centric …

I’m in Brno for the ECREA conference later this week, but we start with a preconference organised by the DigiWorld network on social media and elections research. The first speaker is Tuuli Tomperi, whose focus is on the affective construction of political meaning through multimodal campaign content, in Finland.

Her past work has focussed on political advertising on Meta’s platforms during the 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, and found that candidates mainly used their ads to promote themselves and emphasise party-specific political issues, but that research focussed mainly on textual content and now needs to be expanded to the multimodal aspects …

I’m on 7% charge and only managed to blog the first paper in the final session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow today, which was presented by Sanna Malinen. Her focus is on platforms and censorship, and she notes that activists have increasingly needed to consider visibility-based platform algorithms in their work.

Such algorithms are increasingly shaping visibility rather than banning problematic content altogether; this enables platforms to continue to engage in data gathering and surveillance even when users and their content are made less visible. Such interventions reduce the ability of activists to use such platforms …

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting our reflections on the experience of doing research using the Meta Content Library clean-room environment (and we have just published a new article in Political Communication Report on the clean-room model as well).

The MCL is Meta’s core access model for data from Meta platforms; it replaced the previous platform CrowdTangle in 2024, similarly offering a Web interface and API but transitioning to a clean-room environment within which all serious data work is meant to be conducted. Access …

I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …