Blog

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Anna-Louisa Sacher, whose focus is on the debate about freedom of speech in Germany. Such debates are increasingly heated now, both with respect to terms like “cancel culture” and to a perceived “hate climate”. Right-wing populist actors have particularly inflamed such debates by focussing on specific culture war issues.

There are only a few studies that have studied people’s understandings and perceptions of their freedom of speech in Germany, however. The present study begins from the premise of the democratic dilemma that balances free speech and freedom from discrimination. This is …

The next session at ECREA 2022 is on online deliberation, and begins with Dennis Frieß. He notes that participation in online discussion is now a popular form of online engagement, and normatively it is important that such discussions are pluralistic and inclusive – but in reality they are often dominated by a handful of participants. The question therefore is who speaks out in such online environments. (This also links to Spiral of Silence theory, of course.)

Such participation is thus affected by the perceived climate of opinion within society overall, and the opinion climate in a specific communicative situation. It …

There are duelling keynotes at ECREA 2022 this afternoon, and while I love Eli Skogerbø’s work, I’ve gone to Mirko Tobias Schäfer’s keynote instead. Picking up again on the conference theme of ‘Rethink Impact’, Mirko begins by asking why we should conduct publicly engaged research. Universities are increasingly paying attention to societally engaged research on a number of topics, and the societies and humanities in particular tend to take a particularly defensive stance that continuously seeks to explain how and why they are useful to society. The pandemic has hopefully made this easier to see by now.

It is now …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is David Nicolas Hopmann, presenting on a multinational study of Europeans’ attitudes towards their news media diets as part of the curiously named ThreatPie project. The present paper explores people’s ideas about what a ‘healthy’ diet is; what diets they actually consume; and what perceptions they have of the media their peers consumed. This was done for Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK, with younger (18-25) and older (55+) adults. A larger survey of 18 countries will follow.

Younger adults had a clear idea of a healthy media diet: a balance …

Up next in this ECREA 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, whose focus is on news recommender systems. Such systems are algorithms that provide users with personalised recommendations for news content based on past interactions by them or similar users, overall popularity metrics, and other features.

Such systems are increasingly employed by news organisations internationally, and therefore now also need to be investigated from a political communication perspective. They have implications for political news demand, consumption patterns, and citizens’ information practices. Such systems thus connect both sides of the political information environment, but the research …

The next ECREA 2022 session is on media exposure, and begins with Ole Kelm. He notes the expansion of political participation through the use of online and social media; we now have institutional participation, protests, civic engagement, political consumerism, online activities, and other forms of participation both on- and offline. Political consumerism in particular includes elements such as boycotts, buycotts, discursive political consumerism, and lifestyle political consumerism.

News consumption underpins those activities, and the role of news consumption in boycotts and buycotts has already been investigated; social media activities and political discussions further inform and influence such forms of action …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Jule Scheper, who again highlights both the Spiral of Silence theory, but also the limited effects of such dynamics that have been observed empirically. Under what circumstances, then, might there be more significant effects? The present paper explores this for health communication in the context of COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Perceptions of being in a minority negatively affect people’s willingness to public express their opinions. Further, the present project assumes that the higher the morality of the topic, the stronger the silencing effect; but also, the greater a person’s interest in the …

Next up in this lively ECREA 2022 session on the Spiral of Silence is Oana Stefanita, whose focus is on the expression of hate speech against the Roma community in online spaces in Romania. Hate speech is now widespread and a major problem in online and social media, and takes a number of forms; while platforms are taking some efforts to remove such content, this also conflicts with ideas of ‘free speech’, and can be amplified by platform algorithms. And hate speech can have some very severe psychological and physical effects, of course. Victims of hate speech often tend to …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Liz Solverson, who asks why the majority might remain silent on social media, with a particular focus on why young adults remain silent on political topics on social media. Liz worked with focus groups of young adults, exploring how they used social media for political and general purposes, how they experienced their relationship to political expression, and what they understood as good citizenship.

General explanations for non-participation in political debate is a sense of low internal efficacy: people feeling that they have insufficient skills to express themselves. Additionally, they may fear …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Marius Gerads, whose focus is on integrating hostile media perception into Spiral of Silence theory. People with such perception see the media tenor as dissonant with their own opinion; this leads them to perceive themselves as being in the minority, and Spiral of Silence theory thus suggests that these people would fall silent. But this isn’t what we can now observe; rather, many people with such perceptions are highly vocal in their media critiques.

Spiral of Silence theory focusses on the climate of opinion, and Noelle-Neumann originally suggested that this can …