Politics

It’s a sunny Wednesday in Brno, and we’re starting the ECREA 2026 conference proper now. I’m in a session on the political uses of TikTok, which begins with Eduard-Claudiu Gross, on the situation in Romania. Romania annulled the first round of its presidential election in December 2024, due to a massive Russian election interference campaign, and TikTok played a role in this; the re-run in May 2025 took place in this complicated and polarised political and media environment.

This study, then, gathered some 50,000 TikTok videos from June 2024 to March 2025, from 1,000 authors, and from these examined the …

My own presentation, on behalf of a much larger team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, concluded the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno. For this, we set ourselves an ambitious task: first, given the increasing fragmentation of social media activity across a growing number of platforms, we wanted to explore how we might conduct a true cross-platform analysis of public discussions around the 2025 Australian election campaign, using data from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.

Second, because this meant using the Meta Content Library for access to candidates' and …

We’re into the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno, and I’ll be the final presenter (with slides coming soon). We start, though, with Jan Křovák, whose focus is on populism in the 2025 German and Czech elections.

He begins by describing populism as a communication strategy which is anti-elite and against out-groups, and which has become more mainstream in recent years – mainstream parties confronted by populist challengers have increasingly adopted populist rhetoric, while populist parties themselves have also become more mainstream in their electoral appeal.

This has played out very differently in …

And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the São Paulo mayoral elections in 2024. These were the first elections after the divisive 2022 federal election and 2023 coup attempt led by disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, and therefore also served as a kind of barometer for the political mood in the country.

Bruna’s interest here is in how this intersects with Meta’s stated policy to reduce the amount of political content made visible in its users’ Facebook, and later also Instagram, feeds; the …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Kajsa Falasca, whose focus is on TikTok engagement ahead of the upcoming Swedish election. TikTok analysis is complicated, and requires an attention to multimodal content; this study employed an approach called Multimodal Narrative Mapping, using a methodological approach which automatically scrolls through videos and analyses the content of the videos displayed.

In this sense, then, TikTok changes both the process of campaigning and the object of analysis: content served to users extends beyond the accounts that users themselves follow, and is also determined by what …

And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on political campaigning on Facebook in the Nordic countries. Social media are of course now used widely as a way of bypassing conventional media in campaign communication; this is particularly interesting for populist communicators.

European Parliament elections provide a useful case for comparative research, and the comparison of the Nordic EU countries Denmark, Finland, and Sweden is particularly interesting given their political similarities: parties rather than candidates tend to be the central political actors here; government …

And the post-lunch session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno today starts with Georgios Lappas, whose focus is on a comparative Facebook study of party agendas across Europe during the European Parliament elections. How are such agendas structured: by national contexts, or transnational European party alliances? And how do audiences respond to this, using Facebook’s affordances for reactions and responses? Does this differ by policy areas?

This study covered 21 EU countries, 141 political parties, and nearly 20,000 Facebook posts over the four weeks before election day; it considered 11 policy fields that were constructed …

The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Patrick Parschan, whose focus is on the use of ideal point estimation for the analysis of party positions in campaign tweets. There are various text scaling algorithms for the analysis of political positions in tweets on a left-right scale, in comparison with party manifestos, but unfortunately these often do not agree with each other.

Patrick approached this with data for US and German elections across several years, using party manifestos and tweet corpora. Existing approaches have tended to draw on word frequency …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is our host Martina Edr Novotná, who continues our focus on gender. Gender stereotypes create barriers for women in politics; they also align such women with issues that are perceived to be female-coded, and thereby limit their ability to engage in other topics. But evidence on such gendering remains inconsistent, as party affiliation and other aspects also intersect with such patterns.

This study, then, examined gender issue ownership on Facebook across some 18 countries in the DigiWorld research network. It focussed on national …