Streaming Media

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Darian Harff, whose interest is in the political topics covered by social media influencers in Germany and Flanders. Social media influencers run popular social media accounts and have become well-known because of their content specialties, but some occasionally also address political topics. This can be consequential in affecting public opinion especially amongst younger audiences, but is also problematic because they often have no formal political expertise. Such influencers can therefore emerge as opinion leaders who curate political information.

What topics do such influencers cover, then? Are these issues of collective …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

But the social media ecosystem does not replicate the web ecosystem, and some news outlets are making better use of those ecosystems to attract audiences than others. Users’ choices of platforms, and news outlets’ choices in engaging with platforms, both affect the formation of platform used …

The next session of the ICA 2024 conference that I’m in starts with Christian Pipal, whose interest is in political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. He begins by noting the use of TikTok by the Austrian presidential candidate (and subsequently president) in Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, who both announced his candidacy there and posted the requisite dancing videos.

TikTok may be especially attractive to political candidates because of its younger audience profile, but is this dancing or talking politics? Candidates have explored some very different communicative styles that seem to work for them on this platform: comedic, documentary …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social …

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

Indeed, engagement with the Sweden Democrats’ social media activities is substantial; their accounts reach a large and especially young audience …

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with the wonderful Katrin Weller, who begins by noting that her institution, GESIS, is now also launching DP-REX, the Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research. But her talk is actually about assessing the impact of scientific impact through altmetric scores, with a particular focus on the engagement with scientific content that takes place in YouTube videos. The project uses data from Altmetric.com, who identified links to scientific articles in the descriptions of YouTube videos between 2006 and 2017.

The analysis conducted a manual coding of some …

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

Mainstream media continue to play a key agenda-setting role on social media platforms, but the way this works differs across social media platforms. Carly collected data from several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) around the UNESCO ‘in danger’ recommendation in 2021. The recommendation was eventually ignored by the …

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

These events exemplify the use of such media for the organisation of populist protest movements, supported and inflamed by fringe news outlets and enhanced …

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides: