Politics

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on debates on Twitter relating to climate change. Future scenarios are essential for climate change research, and the journalistic framing of such futures is critical for the public understanding of climate change threats. For Germany, the US, South Africa, and India, the project examined some 56,000 articles on climate change from 2017 to 2020, covering a broad range of media outlets.

But not all such articles were covering climate change in depth or discussing future scenarios; there was a need to extract articles covering climate change …

The final ECREA 2022 session for today starts with Soyeon Jin, whose focus is on the European immigration debate. She notes that Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration have improved over the years, yet there also seems to be an increasing amount of controversial debate around; what is going on here? Traditional assumptions are that more negative sentiment produces more negative messages on social media, but this may not be the only dynamic here; people with more extreme views may simply have become more active in their social media posting, too.

To further explore this, Soyeon’s work focusses on reaction buttons on …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was …

The third speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Delia Dumitrica, whose focus is on political humour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her project investigated the representation of politicians in such humour as an expression of trust in politics, across Estonia, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Romania, working with data from digital media during the March to July 2020 period.

Much of this political humour was directed at national political actors, COVID-19 policies, and national institutions; less so at the polity, international political actors, and others. Some of this was poking innocuous fun about the political authority that …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Qinfeng Zhu, whose focus is in political talk in WhatsApp groups. This refers not to formal political deliberation, but to everyday political conversations in third spaces online: it is informal, spontaneous, sociable, and outside the realm of formal political discussion. Such casual political talk can be beneficial for democracy as the stakes are lower and the participants are ordinary citizens, but can also be complicated as it emerges in arenas that are less socially grounded where the rules of engagement are less clear. This also means that such political talk, when …

The next session at ECREA 2022 starts with a paper by Gitte Stald, who begins by introducing the notion of sustainable democracy; this concept had ecological overtones before, but more lately we’ve also begun to speak more generally about how to sustain democracy itself – and that may also need innovation to democracy itself. This question is often addressed from a systemic and government perspective, but it is critical to also take into account the citizen perspective, of course.

This research then sits at the nexus between informed citizenship, participation, democratic self-confidence, and trust in information as well as the …

The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides:

The next ECREA 2022 session is on the dissemination of genuine and problematic news, and I’m involved in two of the papers being presented. We start with Bradley Wiggins, whose focus is on conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board.

The data for this work were collected by the DMI 4CAT tool, using terms such as ‘steal’ and ‘Trump’ during 3-9 January 2021. This is part of a larger spike in 4chan activity that commence from November 2021, during and after the US presidential election. Bradley also points out that Trump has a long history of cozying up with the …

The final speakers in this ECREA 2022 session are Bradley Wiggins and Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, whose focus is on QAnon. Bradley describes this as “a new American religion”, but also points out that it has elements of a LARP (live action role play); it gamifies increasingly violent insurrection. From the US this also reaches elsewhere, for instance with the Reichsbürger in Germany and other groups in Canada, Russia, and elsewhere.

This is done also through memes, and in a sense such memes constitute organisations: they are a cultural replicator that construct organisations as their survival machines. For instance, the development of …