I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals.

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists.

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication:

The final speaker in this last ECREA 2022 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on the far right in Portugal and Spain. Until a few years ago, these countries had no major far-right parties, but the Catalan independence struggle led to the emergence of Vox as a successful far-right party in Spain in 2017, and Chega followed in Portugal a couple of years later.

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.