Social Media

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping.

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

My presentation was up next at IAMCR 2023, and outlines the overall agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are the slides:

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else.