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The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.

These issues were brought to the forefront again during the imprisonment of former president Lula da Silva and the presidency of former soldier Jair Bolsonaro, which emboldened military leaders to involve themselves …

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

The case study focusses on Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, who has been in the office since 2019 and therefore through the COVID-19 pandemic. She leads a minority Social Democrat government – an unusual setup in …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, who also works with the URL shares dataset provided by Facebook via Social Science One. He also utilises the generative artificial intelligence tools now provided by OpenAI in order to examine the themes of and partisan attention to the topics circulating in discourse surrounding the 2018 and 2022 Italian election campaigns.

The URL shares dataset is centred on users’ engagement with URLs, and contains some random Gaussian noise designed to prevent the re-identifiability of users. The present project extracted the title and description of political URLs mainly …

Next up in our AoIR 2023 session is the wonderful Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on understanding the processes that led to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the United States. She builds on an analysis of every Facebook and Twitter post and Facebook and Instagram ad by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and focusses here especially on Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election.

One of his key points of focus was on mail-in ballots (which were especially common in the 2020 election as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), questioning the validity of such ballots and …

The next session at AoIR 2023 is our own panel, and starts with a presentation by Jessica Walter and Anja Bechmann. Their focus is on influence processes surrounding verified false content across the EU, with particular focus on national differences between EU countries as well as differences driven by other demographic factors. The EU is relatively understudied with respect to the influence of mis- and disinformation, compared to the US and other countries.

The distribution of verified false content represents a case study of unwanted influence; the present study focusses on false content on Facebook as identified by Meta’s third-party …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Alena Kluknavská, whose interest is in truth contestation on Facebook during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; it approaches this through a country-comparative study involving several European nations (Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Truth contestation is especially prominent during crises, but we know very little about the dynamics between contestants in this process.

This can be approached through discourse network approaches, exploring how actors shape discourses of truthfulness and create binary divisions between the liars and the truthful. Such divisions often also map onto anti-elite antagonisms …

I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Luna Staes, whose focus is also on online user engagement with street protests. Social movement organisations are using social media to engage with the public, and this also generates user engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) that provide instant feedback on online publics’ appetite for protest messages.

But to what extent do protest messages actually resonate, and what explains such user engagement: is this related to the features of the actual protest, of the content about the protest, or of the digital communication style itself? The present study examined …

The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative …