Dr. Rachel Gibson, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, discusses British political parties’ digital campaigning from websites to social media. We take a longitudinal dive into the development of digital campaigning in the UK, and compare it to campaigning practices in the US. Then, we examine how citizens’ political participation is evolving through their use of digital communication technologies.
Dr. Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, guests to discuss the “News Finds Me Perception” and the role of social media in it. Citizens who believe that the news will simply find them are heavy users of social media, and Dr. Gil de Zúñiga’s research shows that this negatively impacts political interest and political knowledge. In the episode, we parse out the effects and implications of News Finds Me for democracy.
Dr. Paul Reilly, Senior Lecturer in Social Media and Digital Society at the University of Sheffield, shares his research on the role of social media in protests in Northern Ireland. We first discuss the “Irish Border Question” in relation to Brexit, and then hone in on two demonstrations in Northern Ireland: the union flag protests in 2013 and the Ardoyne parade dispute in 2014. The discussion highlights how much of the contemporary debates around Facebook and Twitter (e.g., disinformation, propaganda, and user privacy) have roots much earlier than the 2016 US election.
The two articles covered in the episode are:
Dr. Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at Lund University, joins host Michael Bossetta for the 3rd Annual Social Media and Politics Year in Review! Each presents three “gifts”: nuggets of knowledge that look back to the key trends in social media and politics in 2018 or what to expect in 2019. We discuss politicians as influencers, most shared items on social media, artificial intelligence, clickbait, and much more!
Dr. Jakob Svensson, Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Malmö University, guests to share his research on the logics that drive how digital media operate. We discuss how algorithms and datafication are shaped by developers, and the types of biases that can occur as a result. We also talk about the political implications of artificial intelligence.
The two studies referenced in the episode are:
Study 1 (2015): The Emergence of Network Media Logic in Political Communication: A Theoretical Approach
Study 2 (2018): The End of Media Logics? On Algorithms and Agency
Dr. Dan Mercea, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at City University of London, and Dr. Shawn Walker, Assistant Professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College at Arizona State University, guests to discuss the current state of social media research in an environment where researcher are “Locked Out” of access to platform APIs. We also talk about how social media is used in protest movements, particularly Dr. Walker’s work on Occupy Wall Street and Dr. Mercea’s work on transnational serial activists.
Dr. Marco Bastos, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at City University of London, discusses his research on Twitter bots and botnets in the 2016 Brexit Referendum. We talk about how to identify bots on Twitter, what these bots were sharing, and how the content they share on social media relates to the activity of human users. Later in the episode, we discuss the ethics behind researching bots and whether recent automated account crackdowns by Facebook and Twitter will improve political debates on social media.
The studies we discussed in the episode are:
Dr. Galen Stocking, Computational Social Scientist at Pew Research Center, discusses political polarization and how it relates to social media use. We take a deep dive into how Pew Research Center measures polarization empirically, how polarization has changed over time, and how widening partisan gaps relate to citizens’ traditional and social media habits. Dr. Stocking also discusses the role of computational methods in survey research, using one of his recent studies on media sources shared on Twitter during immigration debates as a case. We also talk about Reddit, which has a relatively low user base in the United States compared to other social media platforms. Yet, Dr. Stocking’s research has uncovered that Reddit users are highly active in consuming news on the site.
Pew Research Center sources cited in the episode:
Graphic Illustration of Political Polarization 1994-2017
Political Polarization and Media Habits (2014)
Sources Shared on Twitter: A Case Study of Immigration (2018)
Dr. Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at Lund University, guests to discuss the 2018 Swedish Elections and social media’s role in it. We break down the election results and talk about what it means for Sweden as well as the European Union.
Here are the links to the studies discussed in the episode:
Moe & Larsson’s 2014 study on Swedish politicians’ Facebook use
Jakob Svensson’s study on Swedish campaigning between elections
Kragh & Åsberg’s study on Russian disinformation via Facebook in Sweden
ComProp’s study of “junk news” during the Swedish election
Dr. Nick Anstead, Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the LSE, guests to discuss his new research on British parties’ Facebook ad targeting during the 2017 election. Using a data from the Chrome browser created by Who Targets Me, Dr. Anstead and his team compare the content, tone, personalization, and calls to action used in these ads. We discuss the findings of that study, as well as outline three challenges for academics studying Facebook ad targeting moving forward: the epistemological, the conceptual, and the systematic.
Read the full study here!