Episodes

#171: Wikipedia Public Relations for Politics, Brands, and Crisis Communication, with Rhiannon Ruff

Rhiannon Ruff, Wikipedia Expert and Founding Partner at Lumino, discusses how politicians and brands can effectively manage their Wikipedia presence. We discuss why Wikipedia is important for Google Search and AI like ChatGPT, and how the tone, norms, and editors of Wikipedia make editing your own page difficult. Rhi shares her tips on how to manage a Wikipedia page in the right way, and why that’s crucial for politicians and political parties. 

 

Here’s a list of links discussed in the episode:

 

Rhi’s book on Wikipedia and Crisis Communications

Rhi’s column on Why Wikipedia can be a PR Problem for Political Campaigns

Stanford Internet Observatory Report on Wikipedia and Elections in British Columbia

A bit more on the infamous Alan MacMaster’s!

#170: Race, Racism, and Resistance on Social Media, with Dr. Rob Eschmann

Dr. Rob Eschmann, Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia University, discusses his latest book When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (University of California Press). 

 

We cover how social media works to unmask everyday experiences of racism, and how this affects student life at American universities. Dr. Eschmann also shares his research on social media, racial microaggressions, and Black Twitter; thoughts on TikTok and algorithmic bias; and how resisting racism requires engaging in conversation. 

#169: Data-Driven Campaigning: How Political Campaigns use Data, Analytics, and Technology, with Prof. Kate Dommett and Dr. Simon Kruschinski

Prof. Kate Dommett, Professor of Digital Politics at the University of Sheffield, and Dr. Simon Kruschinski, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the University of Mainz, discuss their new book: Data-Driven Campaigning and Political Parties.

 

We discuss the book’s theoretical framework on how system-level, regulatory-level, and party-level factors explain variation in data-driven campaigning across five democracies: the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia. 

 

Prof. Dommett and Dr. Kruschinski also break down their findings on how data, analytics, targeting, and personnel differ across these five cases, and how regulation might need to focus on broader structures in the electoral system to minimize the potential harms of campaign practices. 

#168: China’s Digital Strategy for Information Control, with Dr. Andrew MacDonald

Dr. Andrew W. MacDonald, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Duke Kunshan University, shares research from his new book Directed Digital Dissidence in Autocracies: How China Wins Online. 

 

We discuss the Chinese digital and social media context, citizens’ perceptions of online propaganda, and how the state manipulates digital information to further its political interests.

 

We also discuss survey methodology, how citizens circumvent the Great Firewall, and what affect using the internet and VPNs has on trust in the state. 

#167: 2023 Year in Review! Social Media and Politics, with Dr. Anamaria Dutceac Segesten

The 8th Annual Social Media and Politics Year in Review!


This year, we cover the platforms’ year in review reports, AI for political communication, the creator economy, and EU concerns around disinformation and cyberattacks.


Here are links to resources discussed in the episode, and see you in 2024!


Platform Reports:

Meta
Instagram
TikTok
Reddit
Pinterest
Snap
Twitch
Google
YouTube
Pornhub Insights

 

Jimmie Åkesson’s Arabic Deepfake

#166: Democracy, Architecture, and Social Media, with Dr. Jennifer Forestal

Dr. Jennifer Forestal, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, discusses how digital platforms can be approached from an architectural perspective. Dr. Forestal shares insights from her latest book, Designing for Democracy, where she evaluates digital platforms’ democratic potential from the lens of political theory. The episode breaks down a framework for how to assess the democratic quality of social media platforms by examining their degrees of boundaries, durability, and flexibility. Dr. Forestal reveals how these properties can be illustrated by the cases of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. 

#165: Covid Vaccine Hesitancy in Sweden, with Dr. Mia-Marie Hammarlin

Dr. Mia-Marie Hammarlin, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Lund University, shares her research on vaccine hesitancy in Sweden. We discuss the major themes of coronavirus vaccine skepticism on the Swedish online forum Flashback, as well as Dr. Hammarlin’s ethnographic research meeting with vaccine hesitant communities.


Here are links to Dr. Hammarlin’s research mentioned in the episode:


COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Matters of Life and Death (2023)

I bonded with COVID vaccine sceptics over saunas and Mother Earth rituals (2023)


And check out HT-samtal, a podcast on humanities research from Lund! 

#164: Political Persuasion and the Effects of Targeted Social Media Ads, with Dr. Alexander Coppock

Dr. Alexander Coppock, Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, shares his research on measuring the political effects of persuasive information. We discuss how political persuasion affects voters holding different viewpoints, the durability of these effects over time, and how much political ads seem to affect voters’ political attitudes. 

Here are Dr. Coppock’s research studies discussed in the episode: 

 

Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics (2022)

The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver (2020)

Does digital advertising affect vote choice? Evidence from a randomized field experiment (2022)

The impact of digital advertising on turnout during the 2020 US presidential election (Pre-print, 2022)

#162: Negative Campaigning on Facebook in EU Elections, Cross-Platform Extremism, and Dissonant Public Spheres, with Prof. Ulrike Klinger

Prof. Ulrike Klinger, Professor for Digital Democracy at the European New School for Digital Studies at European University Viadrina, shares her latest research on negative campaigning on social media. We discuss some of the challenges in studying digital communication in the EU, as well as what explains a rise in negative campaigning across two European Parliament elections. Prof. Klinger also shares her research on the UN Global Compact for Migration, where extremist ideas from the Identitarian movement were picked up by the mainstream media. Lastly, we discuss Prof. Klinger’s suggestions for increasing researcher data access ahead of the Digital Services Act.


Here are links to the studies discussed in the episode: 

  1.  Are Campaigns Getting Uglier, and Who Is to Blame? Negativity, Dramatization and Populism on Facebook in the 2014 and 2019 EP Election Campaigns (2023)

  2. From the fringes into mainstream politics: intermediary networks and movement-party coordination of a global anti-immigration campaign in Germany (2022)

  3. Delegated Regulation on Data Access Provided for the Digital Services Act (2023)

  4. Political Communication Special Issue: Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres (2023)