scholarly journals The electoral photograph reloaded: a social semiotic approach

Letras ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Osvanilson Dourado Veloso

While studies on the role of social media in political campaigns are growing, we still need to understand how well established communicative resources such as political photographs have been adapted in face of the digital transformation. Departing from Barthes (1972) discussion on electoral photographs, this paper discusses the production of Interactive meanings in photographs uploaded by the three main contenders in the Presidential Election 2014 in Brazil. The results show an expansion both in the functions and semiotic strategies adopted to establish a relationship with viewers through electoral photographs.

2021 ◽  
pp. 089976402199944
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Piatak ◽  
Ian Mikkelsen

People increasingly engage in politics on social media, but does online engagement translate to offline engagement? Research is mixed with some suggesting how one uses the internet maters. We examine how political engagement on social media corresponds to offline engagement. Using data following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, we find the more politically engaged people are on social media, the more likely they are to engage offline across measures of engagement—formal and informal volunteering, attending local meetings, donating to and working for political campaigns, and voting. Findings offer important nuances across types of civic engagement and generations. Although online engagement corresponds to greater engagement offline in the community and may help narrow generational gaps, this should not be the only means to promote civic participation to ensure all have a voice and an opportunity to help, mobilize, and engage.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87
Author(s):  
Nina Gorenc

The research behind this paper is set in the context of the 2016 US presidential election that has come to symbolize the post-truth era. We conducted a literature review on the 2016 election, with the aim to better understand the impact of computational propaganda on the election outcome and on the behaviour of voters. The paper opens with a definition of post-truth society and related concepts such as fake news and computational propaganda. It explores the changes of political communication in a digital environment and analyses the role of social media in the 2016 election. It probes into phenomena such as the trivialization of politics and the loss of credibility of political actors, which are both common in post-truth societies. The reviewed literature seems to indicate that social media have become strong actors on the political stage, but so far not the predominant source of political information and influence on the behaviour of voters. The paper makes two important contributions. Firstly, drawing on the concept of post-truth society, it analyses the role of computational propaganda in the 2016 presidential election, and secondly, it attempts to explain the paradox of general political apathy on one hand, and increased political activism on the other. These are some of the challenges we are now facing, and in order to be able to cope with them it is important to acknowledge and understand them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Seerat Sohal ◽  
Harsandaldeep Kaur

The present study is an endeavour to broaden the research on the use of social media websites in political campaigns beyond the ambit of developed countries. This article focuses on scrutinizing the role of YouTube during 2014 Indian Parliamentary elections—the first ‘social media’-based elections in India. The methodology of data collection incorporates the content analysis of 147 YouTube-based audio–visual political advertisements, associating the message characteristics (natures, types and appeals) with message reach (number of views) and viewer engagement (types of comments). The results reveal the failure of the viewers to recognize the association between message reach and viewers’ engagement with message characteristics, confirming the ‘marginal’ use of YouTube. However, the study recommends the incorporation of contemporary, Internet-based social media advertising tools along with the traditional tools in the future political marketing campaigns. This article is instrumental for political marketers and consultants in devising political marketing strategies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chamil Rathnayake ◽  
Wayne Buente

The role of automated or semiautomated social media accounts, commonly known as “bots,” in social and political processes has gained significant scholarly attention. The current body of research discusses how bots can be designed to achieve specific purposes as well as instances of unexpected negative outcomes of such use. We suggest that the interplay between social media affordances and user practices can result in incidental effects from automated agents. We examined a Twitter network data set with 1,782 nodes and 5,640 edges to demonstrate the engagement and outreach of a retweeting bot called Siripalabot that was popular among Sri Lankan Twitter users. The bot served the simple function of retweeting tweets with hashtags #SriLanka and #lk to its follower network. However, the co-use of #Sri Lanka and/or #lk with #PresPollSL, a hashtag used to discuss politics related to Sri Lanka’s presidential election in 2015, resulted in the bot incidentally amplifying the political voice of less engaged actors. The analysis demonstrated that the bot dominated the network in terms of engagement (out-degree) and the ability to connect distant clusters of actors (betweenness centrality) while more traditional actors, such as the main election candidates and news accounts, indicated more prestige (in-degree) and power (eigenvector centrality). We suggest that the study of automated agents should include designer intentions, the design and behavior of automated agents, user expectations, as well as unintended and incidental effects of interaction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 172-180
Author(s):  
D. Klyuchevskiy

The purpose of this article is to analyze the experience of using social networks as a political marketing tool in the US presidential elections. This article partially touches upon the global topic of marketization and digitalization of both the political process in general and at the level of the US presidential election. The paper highlights the changing role of social media as a policy tool, which today has become not only a tool for distributing content, but also one of the tools for analyzing data from the electorate. The author explores the possibilities of social networks, their strengths and weaknesses and development prospects in the field of political marketing. The work touches upon the role of social networks in the formation of «Electronic Democracy», their impact on the candidate's image and the relationship with the personalization of politics in the United States. The main method in the article is comparative analysis. The result was the definition of the role, key features of the mentioned social networks in the field of modern politics. A certain theoretical contribution is seen in the argumentation of the following observations: the speed of interaction between the candidate and the voter through social networks has increased, in addition, the area of image-making has been partially «digitalized». It was revealed that technologies of information influence on American voters, which positively influenced the results of the 2016 presidential election for the Republican candidate, lowered D. Trump's ratings during the 2020 elections.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511985514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulsamad Sahly ◽  
Chun Shao ◽  
K. Hazel Kwon

This study investigates cross-platform differences in social media by analyzing the contending candidates who represent different political ideology during the 2016 presidential election. Borrowing the frame-building and frame-effect perspectives, it examines the ways in which the two contending candidates (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton) built their message frames in two different social platforms—Twitter ( N = 3,805) and Facebook ( N = 655)—and how the frame differences affected audience engagement in each platform. The results showed that Trump’s messages presented more variety in frame selection than Clinton’s, focusing on conflict and negative emotional frames on Twitter while displaying frequent positive emotional frames on Facebook. Clinton’s strategy relied heavily on conflict and positive emotional frames on both Twitter and Facebook. The results also suggested that for both Trump and Clinton followers on Twitter, conflict and morality frames consistently attracted retweeting behaviors and emotional frames attracted favoriting behaviors. However, Facebook engagement behaviors did not show a consistent pattern between the followers of the two candidates.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Aryati Arbay ◽  
Julian Aldrin Pasha ◽  
Ari Santoso Widodo

The effect from COVID-19 pandemic has changed how presidential candidates do their political campaigns. The restriction to do social distancing makes the usual campaign not doable. That’s why presidential candidates need to find another way for their political campaign, which is by doing things digitally. This digitally driven changes can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we discuss about the consequences of the changes in political campaigns in digital form or through social media for democratic societies in US presidential election. We use qualitative descriptive with case study method. In this paper we use secondary data such as research journals that’s related to this topic, documentation and articles. We find that the changes to digital campaigning have its own pros and cons that can affect how politicians do their campaigns on their social media platforms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth C. Lewis ◽  
Logan Molyneux

Amid a broader reckoning about the role of social media in public life, this article argues that the same scrutiny can be applied to the journalism studies field and its approaches to examining social media. A decade later, what hath such research wrought? In the broad study of news and its digital transformation, few topics have captivated researchers quite like social media, with hundreds of studies on everything from how journalists use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat to how such platforms facilitate various forms of engagement between journalists and audiences. Now, some 10 years into journalism studies on social media, we need a more particular accounting of the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that have crept into this line of research. Our purpose is to provoke reflection and chart a path for future research by critiquing themes of what has come before. In particular, our goal is to untangle three faulty assumptions—often implicit but no less influential—that have been overlooked in the rapid take-up of social media as a key phenomenon for journalism studies: (1) that social media would be a net positive; (2) that social media reflects reality; and (3) that social media matters over and above other factors.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-277
Author(s):  
Nur Aslamaturrahmah Dwi Putri

Indonesia has experienced a fairly rapid development in terms of democracy. Changes in the way in democracy affect the implementation of democracy itself. Conventional democracy that is usually used slowly changes but not as a whole becomes digital democracy. The dimensions of a digital democracy are the dimensions of the campaign which is one of the sequences that must be passed by the candidate pair during the democratic party, namely the election. Political campaigns that used to spend huge amounts of money because they were carried out conventionally turned to political campaigns with quite cheap costs, namely by using social media. But in its implementation the interactions that occurred during the campaign on social media took place very intensely but many were charged with violations, namely hoaxes, hate speech and containing elements of sara. This is due to the lack of public knowledge of the mechanisms and rules for campaigning on social media. So it is very necessary to hold community service activities in the form of socialization in order to increase public knowledge so as not to be ensnared by law in the current political years. With the hope that the community will be wiser in interacting on social media and conducive conditions in a regional head election or presidential election can be achieved. Keywords :socialization, politic campaign, social media


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Bryan Kirschen

Abstract This study analyzes discourse in and about Spanish by presidential hopefuls and their prospective running mates leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election. I utilize Irvine and Gal’s (2000) framework of semiotic processes to reveal how Democratic and Republican politicians implement iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure in order to appeal to their respective bases. Further, I demonstrate how discourse in and about Spanish may be considered marked to one party and unmarked to another. Analysis is based on a 70-item corpus consisting of broadcasted and printed media, as well as content promulgated over social media during this election cycle. In analyzing key discursive moments that focus on “language”, I address national ideologies as well as latinidad and its appropriation. As such, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of Spanish and the Latino electorate within the United States.


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