POLITICAL NETWORKS ON TWITTER

This paper examines patterns of political activity and campaigning on Twitter in the context of the 2012 election in the Australian state of Queensland. Social media have been a visible component of political campaigning in Australia at least since the 2007 federal election, with Twitter, in particular, rising to greater prominence in the 2010 federal election. At state level, however, they have remained comparatively less important thus far. In this paper, uses of Twitter in the Queensland campaign from its unofficial start in February through to the election day of 24 March 2012 are tracked. Using innovative methodologies for analysing Twitter activities, developed by the research team, this study examines the overall patterns of activity in the relevant hashtag #qldvotes, and tracks specific interactions between politicians and other users by following some 80 Twitter accounts of sitting members of parliament and alternative candidates. Such analysis provides new insights into the different approaches to social media campaigning which were embraced by specific candidates and party organizations, as well as an indication of the relative importance of social media activities, at present, for state-level election campaigns.     

YOUTUBE,TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.     

TWITTER AS A TECHNOLOGY FOR AUDIENCING AND FANDOM

Amongst the most prominent uses of Twitter is its role in the discussion of widely televised events: Twitter's own statistics for 2011, for example, list major entertainment spectacles (the MTV Music Awards and the BET Awards) and sports matches (the UEFA Champions League final and the FIFA Women's World Cup final) amongst the events generating the most tweets per second during the year. During such major media events, Twitter is used most predominantly as a technology of fandom: it serves as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event as it unfolds live. This article examines the use of Twitter as a technology for the expression of shared fandom in the context of a major, internationally televised annual media event: the Eurovision Song Contest. Our analysis draws on comprehensive data sets for the ‘official’ event hashtags, #eurovision, #esc, and #sbseurovision. Using innovative methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of Twitter data sets containing several hundreds of thousands, overall patterns of participation to discover how audiences express their fandom throughout the event are examined. Such analysis is able to provide a unique insight into the use of Twitter as a technology for fandom and for what in cultural studies research is called ‘audiencing’: the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event. The work points to Twitter as an important new medium facilitating the connection and communion of fans.     

‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party’s impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates’ personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use.     

‘Social media logic’ meets professional norms: Twitter hashtags usage by journalists and politicians

Social media is characterized by a set of principles defined as ‘social media logic’ [van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1, 2–14. doi:10.12924/mac2013.01010002], derived from the theory of ‘media logic’ developed in the era of mass media [Altheide, D. L., & Snow, R. P. (1979). Media logic. London: Sage.]. This article explores how ‘social media logic’ impacts on two interconnected but yet distinct professions, journalism and politics, by analysing one of the key principles of social media logics, namely ‘connectivity’, an advanced strategy of algorithmically connecting users to content and other users in social media [van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1, 2–14. doi:10.12924/mac2013.01010002]. The operationalization of connectedness in this study is the Twitter hashtag, as it is the most common feature for users to connect and relate to within a larger networked discourse [Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2015). Twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. In N. Rambukkana (Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 13–27). New York, NY: Peter Lang.]. The empirical material consists of tweets posted by 10 Norwegian politicians and 10 journalists, selected on their level of activity on Twitter. The tweets are analysed with the emphasis on the frequency and content of the hashtags, and the methodological design is comparative between the journalists and the politicians. A key finding is that there are significant differences between how journalists and politicians use hashtags, but that they both use mass media hashtags to reach outside their follower networks. Consequently, this demonstrates that journalists’ and politicians’ use of social media is closely connected to their professional norms, and that the ‘social media logic’ is still related to the ‘media logic’ of mainstream and broadcast media.     

Dynamic social media affiliations among UK politicians

Inter-personal affiliations and coalitions are an important part of politicians’ behaviour, but are often difficult to observe. Since an increasing amount of political communication now occurs online, data from online interactions may offer a new toolkit to study ties between politicians; however, the methods by which robust insights can be derived from online data require further development, especially around the dynamics of political social networks. We develop a novel method for tracking the evolution of community structures, referred to as ‘multiplex community affiliation clustering’ (MCAC), and use it to study the online social networks of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the United Kingdom. Social interaction networks are derived from social media (Twitter) communication over an eventful 17-month period spanning the UK General Election in 2015 and the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016. We find that the social network structure linking MPs and MEPs evolves over time, with distinct communities forming and re-forming, driven by party affiliations and political events. Without including any information about time in our model, we nevertheless find that the evolving social network structure shows multiple persistent and recurring states of affiliation between politicians, which align with content states derived from topic analysis of tweet text. These findings show that the dominant state of partisan segregation can be challenged by major political events, ideology, and intra-party tension that transcend party affiliations.     

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

Young people,social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk

Social media is pervasive in the lives of young people, and this paper critically analyses how politically engaged young people integrate social media use into their existing organisations and political communications. This qualitative research project studied how young people from a broad range of existing political and civic groups use social media for sharing information, mobilisation and, increasingly, as a means to redefine political action and political spaces. Twelve in-person focus groups were conducted in Australia, the USA and the UK with matched affinity groups based on university campuses. The groups were of four types: party political group, issue-based group, identity-based group and social group. Our focus group findings suggest that this in-depth approach to understanding young people's political engagement reveals important group-based differences emerging in young people's citizenship norms: between the dutiful allegiance to formal politics and a more personalised, self-actualising preference for online, discursive forms of political engagement and organising. The ways in which political information is broadcast, shared and talked about on social media by engaged young people demonstrate the importance of communicative forms of action for the future of political engagement and connective action.     

I do not believe you: how providing a source corrects health misperceptions across social media platforms

Social media are often criticized as serving as a source of misinformation, but in this study we examine how they may also function to correct misperceptions on an emerging health issue. We use an experimental design to consider social correction that occurs via peers, testing both the type of correction (i.e., whether a source is provided or not) and the platform on which the correction ocratcurs (i.e., Facebook versus Twitter). Our results suggest that a source is necessary to correct misperceptions about the causes of the Zika virus on both Facebook and Twitter, but the mechanism by which such correction occurs differs across platforms. Implications for successful social media campaigns to address health misinformation are addressed.     

News and information leadership in the digital age

This paper examines information networks on social media to draw conclusions about influence relationships among members of the mass media. The project considers social networks and information patterns using Twitter data, first at the newspaper level and second at the journalist level. Using a computational approach, we look for evidence of elite-directed information flows, as well as exploring whether we find evidence of an increase in the democratization of newsmaking. This study finds that elite voices continue to dominate information networks in the digital age; however, it also finds evidence that information can move expeditiously from journalists in local and regional outlets to elite ones, and vice versa. We move further to explore the content of tweets among the journalist network, finding that there are substantial, direct interactions among elite and regional and local journalists. Our results taken together uncover new network patterns and provide a novel insight on the role of information technologies in newsmaking in the digital age.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Building protest online: engagement with the digitally networked #not1more protest campaign on Twitter

This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maintaining engagement over time is a key challenge for social movements attempting to network digitally. This article argues that proximity serves as a condition to address this challenge, because it configures the personal networks upon which transmission depends. This is a paradox of digital activism: it has the capacity to transcend barriers; however, proximity is essential for sustaining relations over time. Examining Twitter data from the #not1more protest campaign against immigrant deportations in the United States, quantitative and social network analyses show a differentiated development of engagement, which results in a particular geographical configuration with the following attributes. First, there is a robust and connected backbone of core organizers and activists located in particular major cities. Second, local groups engage with the campaign with direct actions in other cities. Third, a large and transitory contingent of geographically dispersed users direct attention to the campaign. We conclude by elaborating how this geographically differentiated configuration helps to sustain engagement with digitally networked action.     

Work orders: Analysing employment histories using sequence data

The analysis of employment histories has been facilitated recently by advances in survey methodology, statistical processes and computing power. While much work has focused on transitions between states and time spent in one state, the potential of analysing a series of states (i.e. careers) has largely been ignored. A concentration on movement between two states, whilst allowing relevant contextual covariates to be controlled for, often ignores valuable data both prior to and after the episode in question. Analysis of extended sequences of employment states is better able to describe employment trajectories. Furthermore, comparison of sequences permits either allocation to theoretical categories, or the identification of latent groupings using cluster analysis. The resulting typology of careers can then be used in inferentially based analyses. This paper explores sequence analysis using Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). OMA is explained in relation to one broad substantive issue: the relationship between employment trajectories and gender.     

The popularity and virality of political social media: hashtags,mentions, and links predict likes and retweets of 2016 U.S. presidential nominees’ tweets

What political social media messages resonate and get shared? We analyzed the first three months of tweets from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump since winning their respective nominations and found that messages containing #hashtags, @usermentions, or http://www.websitelinks.com decreased likes and retweets. While these features are intended to increase audience exposure, their presence concurrently increases disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognition. These features make the message less visually clear (perceptual disfluency) and require the translation of symbols and text strings into meaning (orthographic disfluency). Features that improved processing fluency (i.e. embedded images) increased interactions. These findings underscore the importance of fluency in brief word-of-mouth transmissions and suggest strategies for social media users seeking to influence the voting public.     

Supplementing a survey with respondent Twitter data to measure e-cigarette information exposure

ABSTRACT

Social media data are increasingly used by researchers to gain insights on individuals’ behaviors and opinions. Platforms like Twitter provide access to individuals’ postings, networks of friends and followers, and the content to which they are exposed. This article presents the methods and results of an exploratory study to supplement survey data with respondents’ Twitter postings, networks of Twitter friends and followers, and information to which they were exposed about e-cigarettes. Twitter use is important to consider in e-cigarette research and other topics influenced by online information sharing and exposure. Further, Twitter metadata provide direct measures of user’s friends and followers as opposed to survey self-reports. We find that Twitter metadata provide similar information to survey questions on Twitter network size without inducing recall error or other measurement issues. Using sentiment coding and machine learning methods, we find Twitter can elucidate on topics difficult to measure via surveys such as online expressed opinions and network composition. We present and discuss models predicting whether respondents’ tweet positively about e-cigarettes using survey and Twitter data, finding the combined data to provide broader measures than either source alone.     

Unions and social media: Prospects for gender inclusion

The emergence of web 2.0 technologies led to optimistic predictions that social media (SM) might alter traditional gendered patterns of member participation in trade unions. Greene, Hogan, and Grieco and others suggested that the forms of communication and engagement these technologies offered to unions and their members had the potential to foster gender inclusion and contribute to union diversity, arguably central to effective representation. This article reports on a survey of union members’ experiences with and perceptions of their union's SM services, to identify whether there is a gendered dimension to members’ use. The findings indicate that for most union members regardless of gender, more traditional communication channels such as face‐to‐face contact and email remain the preferred means of communication. However, the findings also show that women are just as likely as men, if not more so, to engage with union SM. Given that historically, women largely participated less in union activities than their male counterparts, this broad parity of use by women supports the conclusion that SM has substantial potential to improve women's participation in unions.     

Facing an uncertain reception: young citizens and political interaction on Facebook

This article explores how the social ambiguities concerning audience and reception of posts on Facebook shape the forms of political interaction among young citizens on the site. Two sets of in-depth interviews are used to illustrate the ways that uncertainties about audience reception on Facebook inspire strategies for ‘inventing’ modes of political interaction on the one hand, and, for others, suppress opinion expression by creating the sense that talking politics on the site is a high risk endeavor.     

Algorithms and agenda-setting in Wikileaks’ #Podestaemails release

ABSTRACT

In the month before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Wikileaks released 37 serialized batches of e-mails authored by former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Each release was announced using a unique PodestaEmail related hashtag (#PodestaEmails2, #PodestaEmails3, etc.). In total, Podesta e-mail related hashtags hit town-wide, country-wide, or worldwide Trending topics lists a total of 1,917 times, remaining on Trending Topic lists everyday within the U.S. for 30 days before election day. In this article, we discuss how Wikileaks’ release methodology increased the potential reach of Podesta E-mail related content. We describe how Wikileaks’ tweets spoke to two audiences: Twitter users and Twitter algorithms. In serializing its content and using new hashtags for each release, Wikileaks increased the potential persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of this content. By creating the possibility for this content to remain persistently visible on the Trending Topics list, Wikileaks was able to potentially realize a greater degree of agenda-setting than would have been possible through singular hashtag use.     

Do Social Networks Really Matter in Contentious Politics?

A considerable number of studies in the social movement literature stress that social networks are a key factor for those participating in political protest. However, since empirical evidence does not universally support this thesis, we propose to examine three core questions. Do networks really matter for participants in political protest? Are social networks important for all types of protest? Finally, what are social networks and in which ways are they important? By answering these questions this paper aims to provide three contributions to social movement literature: first, we want to put networks in their place and not reifying their influence on participation processes; second, we describe and explain variations of networks influence on protest participation; third, to pursue the theoretical reflection initiated by Kitts, McAdam, and Passy on the specification of network effect on contentious participation, that is, to disentangle the different processes at stake. Many scholars argue for empirical works analyzing the link between networks and cognition, but this remains a pious wish. Here, we propose to systematically examine the effect of social interactions on activists' cognitive toolkit.