Denmark

#58: Facebook’s Political Ad Archive and Web Scraping to Improve It, with Søren Pedersen

Søren Pedersen, a Danish software developer working for Extra Bladet, joins the podcast to discuss his project uspolads.com. Søren used web scraping technology to build a website that presents data from the Facebook political ad archive ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections. We talk about Søren’s motivations in building uspolads, as well as discuss some his previous work using Facebook and Twitter data to reveal insights about politics and tech addiction.

Click here to check out the official Facebook Ad Archive.

#32: Radicalization and Foreign Fighters: The Story of Lukas, with Karolina Dam

Karolina Dam, founder of the NGO Sons and Daughters of the World, joins the podcast this week to tell the story of her son, Lukas. Lukas is a Danish citizen who became radicalized in Copenhagen, fled to Syria, and joined ISIS. We discuss how Facebook groups are used to recruit potential terrorists, the role that social media can play in deradicalization, and the types of communication that take place between a foreign fighter and his mother.

#7: Social Media and Political Youth Organizations in Denmark, with Emilie Demant

Emilie Demant, social media coordinator for Venstres Ungdom, shares her insights into how a Danish political youth organization is using social media to engage young voters with politics. We discuss how Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter are each used differently to communicate politics with young Danes, as well as what types of user-generated content Emilie receives when managing these social media accounts. Emilie highlights the visual element of social media by stressing that memes, GIFs, and videos drive the most engagement on social media, and here digital marketing and graphic design play a key role. We also discuss the differences between a youth political organization and the parent political party, Venstre, and what that means for their social media use. Although exhibiting different rules of political communication on social media (especially on Snapchat), interestingly, both Venstre and Venstres Ungdom work together to strategically share content across their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter social networks.