Facebook

The next session at ECREA 2024 that I’m attending is on communication in times of illiberalism, and starts with Natalie-Anne Hall. Her focus is on political engagement around Brexit on Facebook, in the post-referendum period between 2017 and 2019. Rather than gathering Facebook content, this study focussed on Facebook users – in recognition of the fact that Facebook remains the leading mainstream social network in the UK.

The post-Brexit context was ripe for populist discursive appeals, which claimed that political elites were attempting to undermine the Brexit referendum results; this was actively fanned by illiberal and often also racist groups …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Azade Kakavand, whose interest is in mapping far-right voices across platforms. This is methodologically difficult, and requires a matching of user identities across platforms – especially also because far-right actors are well-known for using multiple platforms for a variety of distinct purposes.

The present study employs the process of user identity linkage (UIL), which was developed in computer science for user profiling, marketing, and cybersecurity purposes. Here, however, the approach is not limited to natural persons but is applied to human and non-human accounts of any kind. The project draws on …

The next ECREA 2024 session is also on polarisation, and I’m chairing as well as blogging it. We start with Petra de Place Bak, whose interest is in the cognitive preferences that make specific types of online content more salient and shareable. One aspect of this might be sentiment- and emotion-based biases.

Petra’s focus is on social media communication, which has to address the twin challenges of information abundance and attention scarcity; this is affected both by platform algorithms and users’ own cognitive preferences. Negative content biases can play a role especially in the latter, as can biases (both positive …

The first full day at the ECREA 2024 conference begins for me with a panel on Telegram and politics. The first presenter is Corinna Peil, whose interest is in COVID-19 conspiracy narratives on Telegram. How do the people who disseminate such narratives understand content moderation interventions?

Content moderation is a fundamental service that social media platforms provide, but this also generates accusations of censorship; exactly how content moderation works is also a subject of (sometimes conspiracist) ‘folk theories’ about the power and practices of social media platforms, however. The pandemic heightened this further, as it pushed platforms to implement stronger …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

Similarly, there is plenty of evidence of spatial polarisation in the United States, where certain states and counties are regarded as dominated by Republicans or Democrats; this points to a spatial sorting and geographic clustering of political partisans. How might we connect such individual-level homophily and place-level …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

As public health threats rise in a given area, does social media activity by and engagement with health agencies follow? Two dynamics could be present here: there may be more activity …