Social Media

The final ECREA 2022 session for today starts with Soyeon Jin, whose focus is on the European immigration debate. She notes that Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration have improved over the years, yet there also seems to be an increasing amount of controversial debate around; what is going on here?

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

The third speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Delia Dumitrica, whose focus is on political humour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her project investigated the representation of politicians in such humour as an expression of trust in politics, across Estonia, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Romania, working with data from digital media during the March to July 2020 period.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Qinfeng Zhu, whose focus is in political talk in WhatsApp groups. This refers not to formal political deliberation, but to everyday political conversations in third spaces online: it is informal, spontaneous, sociable, and outside the realm of formal political discussion.

The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my liveblog of Dan’s presentation follows below:

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides:

The next ECREA 2022 session is on the dissemination of genuine and problematic news, and I’m involved in two of the papers being presented. We start with Bradley Wiggins, whose focus is on conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board.

The final speakers in this ECREA 2022 session are Bradley Wiggins and Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, whose focus is on QAnon. Bradley describes this as “a new American religion”, but also points out that it has elements of a LARP (live action role play); it gamifies increasingly violent insurrection. From the US this also reaches elsewhere, for instance with the Reichsbürger in Germany and other groups in Canada, Russia, and elsewhere.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Martin Lundqvist, whose interest is in the use of memes in the Northern Ireland conflict, where riots continue to occur with ‘monotonous regularity’, as a local judge recently pointed out. How do online memes engage with these continuing troubles? While we know much about meme culture overall, there is considerably less research on their role in such contexts of continuing post-war violence. Can they also speak to peace-building processes?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat, whose interest is in digital protest cultures on TikTok, or in what he calls the overspilt public sphere. TikTok has become considerably more important in recent years, and this has had some interesting consequences; in Russia, for instance, TikTok now limits its content to Russian-made material, and Russian youth are actively seeking to circumvent such restrictions.