And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.
Elite and mass polarisation have similar dynamics, and may be related to each other; mass polarisation is often measured on a simple left-right political scale, but in multiparty systems can be better assessed within a cognitive political network framework, where respondents assess the interrelationships between the various parties and thereby produce …
The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.
As public health threats rise in a given area, does social media activity by and engagement with health agencies follow? Two dynamics could be present here: there may be more activity …
The next session at Social Media & Society 2024 starts with Leiyuan Tian, who is interested in pro-China influencers on Twitter. These practice a kind of grey propaganda, part of the overall network of Chinese public diplomacy but not formally representing the Chinese government. How do such influencers present themselves, and what persuasive frames do they employ?
The project conducted a snowball sampling to identify some 20 such Twitter accounts, and examined their profiles and a selection of 300 tweets per account between February 2022 and 2023. Key self-presentation strategies and self-images that emerged from this included authenticity (as cultural …
The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Sergei Pashakhin, whose is in the interfacing between platform companies and political institutions, especially in the context of autocratising regimes. Social media platforms operate around the world, and have to respond to the political and legislative situations in the countries in which they operate. Their transparency reports tend to provide a window into how they do so: these reports cover state requests for content moderation and take-downs, for instance.
Such transparency reports are driven in part by US lawmakers’ concerns about platforms’ arrangements with autocratic regimes (such as …
The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jeeyun Sophia Baik, whose interest is in the long-standing allegations of anti-conservative bias that have been made against social media platforms. Such claims have been embraced prominently by Donald Trump and other far-right actors, in particular, and some US politicians have even attempted to ban what they understand as ‘social media censorship’.
The problem is that claims of anti-conservative bias have been proven to be unfounded by a range of studies, and that there is in fact a substantial platforming of conservative and far-right voices by social media …
Now that the Australian federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society has commenced its hearings, the question of Australian policy towards social media platforms has gained in prominence yet again. The Select Committee is conducting a somewhat poorly defined, multi-issue inquiry into several loosely linked topics, and part of its focus is on the future of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) – a policy which seeks to redirect some of the substantial revenues that digital media platforms generate from online advertising to the nation’s financially struggling, often unprofitable news publishers.
