Polarisation

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 was the next speaker in this panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of the COP26 and COP27 summits through our practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:

We have one more paper session on the final day of the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, and it’s a panel coordinated by the great Risto Kunelius that I’m also presenting a paper in. This panel presents outcomes from the CLOUD-C project, which explored discussions around the COP26 (in 2021, which of course took place in Glasgow, too) and COP27 (in 2022, in Sharm El-Sheik) UN climate change summits from a number of perspectives.

Risto kicks us off by introducing the panel itself: data for the project were gathered from Twitter using a set of keywords related to …

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 …

And the next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Catherine Baker, whose focus is on scientific claims in the (Neo-)Manosphere. The far right is often described as anti-science, but this is too simplistic; instead, they are more selective in their engagement with scientific information.

The Manosphere is now well-established as an amalgamation of misogynist and anti-feminist groups, traditionally based in online fora and communities but increasingly also mainstreamed into generic social media and especially also streaming media sites. This has led to the rise of the term Neo-Manosphere to describe these new …

I’m starting off the next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit on behalf of my team. Slides are below: