Discrimination Against Female Politicians on Social Media: An Analysis of Tweets in the Run-Up to the July 2018 Harmonised Elections in Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gibson Ncube ◽  
Gwatisira Yemurai
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Female Politicians ◽  
Run Up

scholarly journals Collecting Pennsylvania Political Twitter Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Dudash ◽  
John E. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Academic Library ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Election Cycles

During the two most recent elections we have seen the importance of social media, and Twitter in particular, for political discourse. This paper describes the effort of an academic library to collect election-related Twitter data from Pennsylvania-specific organizational accounts and hashtags for 2018 and 2020 in the run-up and aftermath of both election cycles. Because of its importance to understanding contemporary politics and its historic value, libraries need to consider the opportunity to collect and make this data accessible to Pennsylvanians.  

(De)legitimizing Scottish independence on Twitter: A multimodal comparison of the main official campaigns

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 580-599
Author(s):  
Robin Engström
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Outcome Research ◽  
Moral Evaluation ◽  
Political Campaigning ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland (YS), outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together (BT), in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents’ positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in the run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns’ communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT.

scholarly journals Marginalizing the Mainstream: How Social Media Privilege Political Information

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web Search ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Cross Platform ◽  
Data Journalism ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Official Sources

The following reports on research undertaken concerning the “misinformation problem” on social media during the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections in 2020. Employing techniques borrowed from data journalism, it develops a form of cross-platform analysis that is attuned to both commensurability as well as platform specificity. It analyses the most engaged-with or top-ranked political content on seven online platforms: TikTok, 4chan, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google Web Search. Discussing the extent to which social media platforms marginalize mainstream media and mainstream the fringe, the analyses found that TikTok parodies mainstream media, 4chan and Reddit dismiss it and direct users to alternative influencer networks and extreme YouTube content. Twitter prefers the hyperpartisan over it. Facebook’s “fake news” problem also concerns declining amounts of mainstream media referenced. Instagram has influencers (rather than, say, experts) dominating user engagement. By comparison, Google Web Search buoys the liberal mainstream (and sinks conservative sites), but generally gives special interest sources, as they were termed in the study, the privilege to provide information rather than official sources. The piece concludes with a discussion of source and “platform criticism”, concerning how online platforms are seeking to filter the content that is posted or found there through increasing editorial intervention. These “editorial epistemologies”, applied especially around COVID-19 keywords, are part of an expansion of so-called content moderation to what I call “serious queries”, or keywords that return official information. Other epistemological strategies for editorially moderating the misinformation problem are also treated.

scholarly journals Confronting Disinformation: Journalists and the Conflict over Truth in #Elxn43

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Tenove ◽  
Stephanie MacLellan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The Political ◽  
Federal Election ◽  
Reporting Practices ◽  
The Third ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Media Manipulation ◽  
Partisan Competition

(Note: This is a pre-print, not copy-edited, of a chapter for publication in: Cyber-Threats to Canadian Democracy, ed. by Holly Ann Garnett and Michael Pal. McGill-Queen’s University Press.) In the run-up to the 2019 federal election in Canada, experts and policymakers raised the possibility that foreign or domestic actors might use disinformation tactics during the campaign. This prompted Canadian journalists to give unprecedented attention to threats that online disinformation might pose to the information ecosystem and thus to electoral integrity. This chapter analyzes how Canadian journalists understood and responded to disinformation in the 2019 federal election campaign.Drawing on interviews with over 30 journalists, we find that while they held competing conceptions of disinformation, most associated it with digitally enabled techniques of media manipulation (e.g. the use of automated social media accounts known as “bots”) pursued by both traditional and newly prominent actors (including foreign states, partisan organizations and loose networks of domestic trolls). To address online disinformation, some journalism organizations developed new reporting approaches and teams, while many journalists and senior editors reflected on how longstanding reporting practices may or may not address this new challenge. We then investigate key challenges that journalists face in countering disinformation by examining three illustrative cases from the 2019 campaign: the alleged role of bots and foreign accounts in online discourse; the salacious rumours about incumbent prime minister Justin Trudeau pushed by foreign and domestic actors, including the U.S.-based website The Buffalo Chronicle; and the potential for leaks of illegally acquired material acquired through hacking operations.Reflecting on disinformation in #elxn43, journalists described three general challenges. Two are relatively new: how to identify novel and sophisticated online disinformation tactics, and how to address disinformation without amplifying its spread on social media. The third is a dilemma that journalists have long faced in election reporting: how to report on misleading claims in a context of intense partisan competition, when journalists themselves are being scrutinized as actors in the political fray.

scholarly journals Analysing Event-Related Sentiments on Social Media with Neural Networks

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
P. Santhi Priya ◽  
T. Venkate swara Rao
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Multilayer Perceptron ◽  
Feature Vectors ◽  
Valuable Addition ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
Run Up ◽  
The Eu

<span lang="EN-US">Sentiment analysis is performed to determine the polarity of opinion on a subject. It has been applied to text corpora such as movie reviews, financial documents to glean information about overall-sentiment anc produce actionable data. Recent events have demonstrated that polling can be sometimes unreliable. People can be difficult to access through conventional polling methods and less than frank in polls. In the era of social media, voters are likely to more freely express their opinion on social media forums about divisive events especially in media where anonymity exists. Analyzing the prevailing opinion on these forums can indicate if there are any deficiencies in polling and can be a valuable addition to conventional polling. We analyzed text corpora from Reddit forums discussing the recent referendum in Britain to exit from the EU (known as Brexit). Brexit was an important world event and was very divisive in the run-up and post vote. We analyzed sentiment in two ways: Initially we tried to gauge positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. In the second analysis, we further split these sentiments into six different polarities based on the directionality of the positive and negative sentiments (for or against Brexit). Our technique utlilized paragraph vectors (Doc2Vec) to construct feature vectors for sentiment analysis with a Multilayer Perceptron classifier. We found that the second analysis yielded overall better results; although, our classifier didn’t perform as well in classifying positive sentiments. We demonstrate that it is possible glean valuable information from complicated and diverse corpora such as multi-paragraph comments from reddit with sentiment analysis.</span>

scholarly journals Does social media enhance party responsiveness? How user engagement shapes parties’ issue attention on Facebook

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882098533
Author(s):  
Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik ◽  
Christina Gahn ◽  
Anita Bodlos ◽  
Martin Haselmayer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Set Covering ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Run Up

Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaigns make use of these new possibilities. To narrow this gap, we use a unique data set covering every Facebook post by party leaders and party organizations in the run-up to the 2017 Austrian parliamentary election. We test the hypothesis that party actors are more likely to double down on issues that have previously generated higher levels of user engagement. We also theorize that responsiveness is conditional on major/minor party status and pre-campaign issue salience. The analysis shows that parties’ issue strategies respond to user engagement, especially major parties on low-salience issues. This represents some of the first empirical evidence on how social media can enhance parties’ issue responsiveness.

scholarly journals Analysing Twitter semantic networks: the case of 2018 Italian elections

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommaso Radicioni ◽  
Fabio Saracco ◽  
Elena Pavan ◽  
Tiziano Squartini
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Structural Evolution ◽  
Semantic Networks ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Run Up ◽  
The One ◽  
Sharing Patterns

AbstractSocial media play a key role in shaping citizens’ political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The entwinement between social media and the unfolding of political dynamics has motivated the interest of researchers for the analysis of users online behavior—with particular emphasis on group polarization during debates and echo-chambers formation. In this context, semantic aspects have remained largely under-explored. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by adopting a two-steps approach. First, we identify the discursive communities animating the political debate in the run up of the 2018 Italian Elections as groups of users with a significantly-similar retweeting behavior. Second, we study the mechanisms that shape their internal discussions by monitoring, on a daily basis, the structural evolution of the semantic networks they induce. Above and beyond specifying the semantic peculiarities of the Italian electoral competition, our approach innovates studies of online political discussions in two main ways. On the one hand, it grounds semantic analysis within users’ behaviors by implementing a method, rooted in statistical theory, that guarantees that our inference of socio-semantic structures is not biased by any unsupported assumption about missing information; on the other, it is completely automated as it does not rest upon any manual labelling (either based on the users’ features or on their sharing patterns). These elements make our method applicable to any Twitter discussion regardless of the language or the topic addressed.

scholarly journals Partisan Selective Exposure in Times of Political and Technological Upheaval: A Social Media Field Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Mothes ◽  
Jakob Ohme
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Field Experiment ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political News ◽  
High Affinity ◽  
Social Monitoring ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Exposure Patterns ◽  
Run Up

Contemporary democracies are increasingly shaped by a surge of populism, posing serious threats to the idea of liberal democracy. Particularly in the run-up to elections, knowledge of such threats is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote. Against this background, the present study examined the likelihood of media users to engage with political news providing critical perspectives on populist movements in a 24-hour social media field experiment during the 2017 federal election campaign in Germany (<em>N</em> = 210). Based on two selective exposure measures, findings suggest that exposure to critical news is contingent upon the conceptualization of populist partisanship as a political orientation of either high commitment (i.e., voting intention) or high affinity (i.e., sympathy for a party). While high commitment triggered a rather classic confirmation bias, especially regarding click decisions, high affinity caused selection patterns to be more strongly guided by informational utility, particularly during newsfeed browsing, with counter-attitudinal information receiving more attention. When public sentiment cues were present, however, attitudinal patterns disappeared. These findings imply that partisan news use in times of political upheaval is best gauged by taking a closer look at the particular type of partisanship that guides selective exposure, as both types of partisanship caused contrary exposure patterns, and that today’s news environments potentially override attitudinal influences by providing additional social monitoring cues.

She belongs in the kitchen, not in Congress? Political engagement and sexism on Twitter

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Tromble ◽  
Karin Koole
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Female Politicians ◽  
Public Views

Social media offer direct lines of communication to many democratic representatives, and, in some instances, they may provide policy-makers and journalists with a better sense of public views. But, are the voices expressed on social media worth heeding? Impersonal and anonymous communication often invites negativity and abuse, including racism and sexism. Indeed, evidence suggests that women face particularly high levels of abuse online. And yet we know relatively little about the role of sexism in citizens’ digitally mediated interactions with their political representatives. Do people direct more criticism and hostility towards female politicians? Using Twitter data comparing political engagement in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, we actually find reason for optimism. In the United Kingdom and the United States, there are no differences in the tone of messages sent to male and female politicians, and Dutch citizens direct more positive messages towards women. Across all three countries, gendered insults towards women are rare.

scholarly journals Comparing ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Media for Violence Monitoring and Crisis Response: Evidence from Kenya

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 205316802093759
Author(s):  
Caitriona Dowd ◽  
Patricia Justino ◽  
Roudabeh Kishi ◽  
Gauthier Marchais
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Crisis Response ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Run Up

This paper assesses the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response and violence research by comparing reports of political violence, and both violent and peaceful demonstrations, produced through social media and traditional media during the Kenyan elections in August and October 2017. We leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter and compare these with events coded from media and published sources by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along two dimensions: 1) geography of violence; and 2) temporality of reporting. We find that the profile of violence recorded varies significantly by source. Records from Twitter are more geographically concentrated, particularly in the capital city and wealthier areas. They are timelier in the immediate period surrounding elections. Records from ACLED have a wider geographic reach, and are relatively more numerous than Twitter in rural and less wealthy areas. They are timelier and more consistent in the run-up to and following elections. While neither source can reveal the ‘true’ violence that occurred, the findings point to the value of drawing on a constellation of various source types given their complementary advantages.

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