Influence of social media will grow in Madagascar

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Political Weapon

Significance The situation has exposed several scandals, putting President Andry Rajoelina and his entourage on the political defensive. Social media has become a potent political weapon in the hands of ruling elites as a way to shape political narratives and discredit opponents. Impacts Rajoelina will struggle to hold together his circle of political allies in the run-up to the 2023 elections. Opposition groups will have difficulty capitalising on government divisions due to their own fragmentation. Social media will play an increasingly central role in driving political debate.

scholarly journals Entrepreneurial marketing and digital political communication – a citizen-led perspective on the role of social media in political discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Nihar Amoncar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Entrepreneurial Marketing ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Purpose The paper intends to explore the role and function of citizen-led social media forums in the marketing of political discourse. Using the entrepreneurial marketing (EM) perspective of “co-creation of value”, this paper aims to explore the manner in which consumers of political communications in a specific region have created user generated value via setting up Facebook forums to manage the risk created by fake news and the trust deficit between citizens and mainstream media (MSM). Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a “netnographic” approach to investigation and the data is analysed manual coding (Kozinets, 2015). Facebook groups form the virtual research field in in the context of this study. This approach is adopted because in a social media environment, netnography capitalises over a growing virtual and online communities and allows researchers to study the richness of these online communities (Mkono and Markwell, 2014). Findings The study provides insights on how administrators and moderators of Facebook groups create value for other users by identifying and communicating the risks emerging from social media-based political communication. The study finds that such citizen-led initiatives act as online social aggregators. The value that such groups offer its users/members resides within a well-bound, controlled and moderated online medium that encourages users to counter fake news and misinformation – thereby solving a key problem within the user market i.e. citizen-media trust deficit. Research limitations/implications The study uses a qualitative, netnographic approach and the emerging insights cannot be generalised. The emergent findings are specific to the context of this study and researchers are encouraged to further test the propositions emerging from this research in varied contexts. Practical implications The study extends the application of EM in political contexts using the seven dimensions of EM, which will provide impetus for future political campaigns in terms of unique value creation for publics. The paper also emerges with the role citizen-initiated forums can play in the effective dissemination of digital political communication as user generated content is aiding political debate. Social implications The study helps highlight the role Facebook forums can play in informing the political discourse within a region. The general distrust amongst the citizens over information produced by MSM has meant vocal critics have taken to Facebook to provide their subjective opinions. Although the findings of this study show that such forums can help identify “fake news” and help citizens discuss and debate the truth, it can also become an avenue to manage propaganda amongst the “unaware” citizens. This paper flags up the issues and benefits of using Facebook forums and in conclusion relates them to similar occurrences of the past to make society aware of the pitfalls of managed propaganda. Originality/value The paper takes initiative in investigating the use of social media in politics from the citizens’ perspective, which is comparatively marginalised against the number of studies taking place, which investigate the political party end use of social media for political marketing.

Down the bot hole: Actionable insights from a one-year analysis of bot activity on Twitter

First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Luceri ◽  
Felipe Cardoso ◽  
Silvia Giordano
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
Run Up ◽  
One Year ◽  
The U.S

Social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are one of the main actors associated with manipulation campaigns, especially in a political context. Uncovering the strategies behind bots’ activities is of paramount importance to detect and curb such campaigns. In this paper, we present a long term (one year) analysis of bots activity on Twitter in the run-up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. We identify different classes of accounts based on their nature (human vs. bot) and engagement within the online discussion and we observe that hyperactive bots played a pivotal role in the dissemination of conspiratorial narratives, while dominating the political debate in the year before the election. Our analysis, in advance of the U.S. 2020 presidential election, reveals both alarming findings of human susceptibility to bots and actionable insights that can contribute to curbing coordinated campaigns.

scholarly journals Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (20) ◽  
pp. e2022491118
Author(s):  
Jeroen M. van Baar ◽  
David J. Halpern ◽  
Oriel FeldmanHall
Keyword(s):  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Neural Synchrony ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Video Material ◽  
The Brain

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals’ and conservatives’ (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one’s aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents—an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.

Western fears of encryption lack substance

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Consumer Trust ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Negative Effect

Significance In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, the political debate on law enforcement 'going dark' due to encryption has resurfaced again in the United States and United Kingdom. However, governments have yet to demonstrate evidence of a loss of security capability because of encryption. Impacts The 'going dark' debate may be being used to distract from security agencies' existing surveillance capabilities. The debate's outcome could have a severe negative effect on consumer trust in internet-based businesses. Businesses will see opportunities in relocation to jurisdictions with robust laws that do not weaken cryptographic systems.

scholarly journals Digital Public Sphere and Geography: The Influence of Physical Location on Twitter’s Political Conversation

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 96-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreu Casero-Ripollés ◽  
Josep-Lluís Micó-Sanz ◽  
Míriam Díez-Bosch
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Negotiation Process ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Conversation ◽  
The Government

Social media has instituted new parameters for the political conversation in the digital public sphere. Previous research had identified several of these new phenomena: political polarisation, hate speech discourses, and fake news, among others. However, little attention has been paid to the users’ geographical location, specifically to the role location plays in political discussion on social media, and to its further implications in the digital public sphere. A priori, we might think that on the digital landscape geographical restrictions no longer condition political debate, allowing increasingly diverse users to participate in, and influence, the discussion. To analyse this, machine learning techniques were used to study Twitter’s political conversation about the negotiation process for the formation of the government in Spain that took place between 2015 and 2016. A big data sample of 127,3 million tweets associated with three Spanish cities (Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia) was used. The results show that the geographical location of the users directly affects the political conversation on Twitter, despite the dissolution of the physical restrictions that the online environment favours. Demographics, cultural factors, and proximity to the centres of political power are factors conditioning the structure of digital political debate. These findings are a novel contribution to the design of more effective political campaigns and strategies, and provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the digital public sphere provided by Twitter.

Moise faces a struggle to unite Haiti behind him

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Process ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Economic Damage ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Run Up

Significance According to these results, Jovenel Moise of the Haitian Party of Bald Heads (PHTK) won a first-round victory with 55.67% of the vote, defeating Jude Celestin of Alternative League for Haitian Progress and Empowerment (Lapeh), who gained just 19.52%. The elections were a rerun of those originally held on October 25, 2015, in which Moise won 32.8% of the vote to Celestin’s 25.2%. Impacts Protests are likely in the run-up to the result’s confirmation, as voters express their dissatisfaction with the political process. The restoration of democratic process should unlock more international aid, some of which was suspended during the political impasse. Security issues will remain a key challenge, exacerbated by the economic damage caused by Hurricane Matthew.

Using Social Media Data to Analyse Issue Engagement During the 2017 German Federal Election

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Florian Meier ◽  
Alexander Bazo ◽  
David Elsweiler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Media Data

A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters’ minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize issue engagement and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians’ communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public’s use of Twitter or politicians’ communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians’ social media data.

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 Influential spreaders in the political Twitter sphere of the 2013 Malaysian general election

2019 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong-liang Sun ◽  
Eugene Ch’ng ◽  
Simon See
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Election Results ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Propagation Network

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate political influential spreaders in Twitter at the juncture before and after the Malaysian General Election in 2013 (MGE2013) for the purpose of understanding if the political sphere within Twitter reflects the intentions, popularity and influence of political figures in the year in which Malaysia has its first “social media election.” Design/methodology/approach A Big Data approach was used for acquiring a series of longitudinal data sets during the election period. The work differs from existing methods focusing on the general statistics of the number of followers, supporters, sentiment analysis, etc. A retweeting network has been extracted from tweets and retweets and has been mapped to a novel information flow and propagation network we developed. The authors conducted quantitative studies using k-shell decomposition, which enables the construction of a quantitative Twitter political propagation sphere where members posited at the core areas are more influential than those in the outer circles and periphery. Findings The authors conducted a comparative study of the influential members of Twitter political propagation sphere on the election day and the day after. The authors found that representatives of political parties which are located at the center of the propagation network are winners of the presidential election. This may indicate that influential power within Twitter is positively related to the final election results, at least in MGE2013. Furthermore, a number of non-politicians located at the center of the propagation network also significantly influenced the election. Research limitations/implications This research is based on a large electoral campaign in a specific election period, and within a predefined nation. While the result is significant and meaningful, more case studies are needed for generalized application for identifying potential winning candidates in future social-media fueled political elections. Practical implications The authors presented a simple yet effective model for identifying influential spreaders in the Twitter political sphere. The application of the authors’ approach yielded the conclusion that online “coreness” score has significant influence to the final offline electoral results. This presents great opportunities for applying the novel methodology in the upcoming Malaysian General Election in 2018. The discovery presented here can be used for understanding how different players of political parties engage themselves in the election game in Twitter. The approach can also be adopted as a factor of influence for offline electoral activities. The conception of a quantitative approach in electoral results greatly influenced by social media means that comparative studies could be made in future elections. Originality/value Existing works related to general elections of various nations have either bypassed or ignored the subtle links between online and offline influential propagations. The modeling of influence from social media using a longitudinal and multilayered approach is also rarely studied. This simple yet effective method provides a new perspective of practice for understanding how different players behave and mutually shape each other over time in the election game.

US election reopens financial reform debate

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Financial Regulation ◽  
Financial Reform ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Financial Crimes ◽  
National Electorate ◽  
Reform Debate

Significance The resilience of the Sanders campaign ahead of the February 1 Iowa caucuses despite its low pre-2015 profile with the national electorate, and the vigilance of banking watchdog Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, continue to shift the political debate on financial regulation leftwards, particularly among Democrats. Impacts Overlap between Republicans and Democrats on Fed transparency may lead to greater scrutiny of the central bank's operations post-2016. Pressure to police and prosecute financial crimes more aggressively will continue to build and will not require legislation to achieve. The likely persistence of divided government will prevent either party from updating bank regulatory legislation.

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