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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 08:15

Social Media Messaging Types by US Gubernatorial Candidates

Politics | Elections | Social Media | AoIR 2015 |

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 07:59

Social Media in Australian Elections through the Years

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.

Social Media in Selected Australian Federal and State Election Campaigns, 2010-15 from Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield
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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 07:11

Social Media and Elections in Sweden since 2010

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2015 is a panel on social media and elections that my colleague Tim Highfield and I are contributing to, but we begin with the excellent Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on recent Swedish elections. Sweden traditionally has a high level of election participation and substantial Internet and social media access, and social media have become increasingly visible in election campaigns, unsurprisingly this has increased over time.

The project followed the election-related hashtags #val2010 and #val2014, and there has been a substantial shift from making undirected statements on Twitter to using retweets to disseminate other …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 02:58

Tweeting Styles of Candidate Accounts in US Gubernatorial Contests

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.

Online campaigns have been studied for several years, and a general finding is that incumbents employ more position-taking strategies, while challengers operate more often in attack mode. This may play out on Twitter slightly differently because of the …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 02:38

#JeNeSuisPasCharlie: Critical Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Politics | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The first presenter at AoIR 2015 this morning is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in the Twitter response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Very quickly, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie emerged to express sympathy and support for the magazine; a negative #JeNeSuisPasCharlie also emerged, however, to critique the magazine's actions. Fabio's interest here is in how this hashtag was discursively positioned.

There were some 74,000 tweets by 41,000 unique users with the negative hashtag, between 7 and 11 January 2015, and Fabio's team used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyse them. They followed the method developed by Stefan Stieglitz and me to …

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Snurb — Friday 23 October 2015 05:21

Does Humour Belong in Politics (on Twitter)?

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The team used live coding and dynamic keyword management during the debate, to capture as much as possible of the Twitter discussion around the debates. This resulted in 427 linguistic rules capturing some 33m tweets from 5.4m users, of which some 51% were retweets.

Audiences and journalists …

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Snurb — Monday 17 August 2015 17:35

Some New Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

It’s been some time since I last posted an update on my latest publications – though you may have seen that on the front page of this site, I’ve updated the banner of the most recent books I’ve been featured in, at last. There is quite a lot more work in the pipeline for the immediate future, including a major new collection which I’ve edited with colleagues in Norway and Sweden – more on that soon.

For now, though, you wouldn’t go wrong if you started by checking out the new journal Social Media + Society, which I’m …

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Snurb — Sunday 9 August 2015 21:36

What If Google Bought Twitter? A Conversation and Some Further Thoughts

Politics | Social Media | Twitter |

Twitter has been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons. Business media report that Twitter shareholders are disappointed with the company’s latest results; and this follows recent turmoil in the company’s leadership which saw the departure of controversial CEO Dick Costolo and the (temporary) return of co-founder Jack Dorsey until a permanent replacement is found.

All this has served to feed rumours that Google, having recently called time on its own underperforming social network Google+, might be interested in acquiring Twitter. From one perspective, this would clearly make sense – social media are now a …

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Snurb — Monday 13 April 2015 09:57

Postdoc Position Available: Public Sphere Theory and Social Media Analytics

Politics | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

In addition to the PhD position I advertised last week, I am now also offering a two-year, full-time postdoc position on the same project at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (international applicants are very welcome). If you’re interested and qualified for the position, please submit a detailed application through the QUT jobs Website, responding to the selection criteria. Full details for the job can be found there, and below I’m including the key details from the job description:

Position Purpose

This appointment supports an ARC Future Fellowship research project investigating intermedia information flows in the …

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Snurb — Thursday 9 April 2015 11:42

Call for PhD Applications: Social Media and Public Communication

Politics | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

We’re now looking for the second PhD student associated with my current ARC Future Fellowship project. The PhD student will receive an annual stipend of A$25,849 over the three years of the PhD project. If you’re interested in and qualified for the PhD project, please contact me by 1 May 2015, directly at a.bruns@qut.edu.au with your CV, names of two referees, and a detailed statement addressing the Eligibility Requirements below. We’ll select the candidate on this basis, and will then ask you to formally apply for the PhD place through the QUT Website.

Full details are below – please …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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