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The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Denise-Adriana Oprea, whose focus is on the representations of the Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă in satirical news sites; this is especially interesting as Romania for the first time has a female PM. She has, however, been accused of being a mere puppet of her party, and this has also been a persistent theme in satirical portrayals.

The project examined these portrayals, in text and visuals, across a number of news satire sites: do these override or reinforce the stereotypical portrayal of female politicians, and are they in line with the …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.

This missing European public sphere has also been blamed as one driver of the U.K.’s recent Brexit vote: without a European public sphere there are few fora available to counteract the negative discussion about the European Union that may be taking place in national …

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.

In ‘fake news’, there is a relation between the content, its dissemination, and the users involved in that dissemination. ‘Fake news’ itself can also be distinguished into mis-, dis- …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Pablo Jost, who begins by discussing the limitations of surveys (expensive, reactive, increasingly unable to reach representative panels of participants) and raises the question of whether digital trace data may be able to be used as an alternative. Twitter might be a poor substitute, as it remains an elite medium in many countries; Facebook use, however, is far more widespread, and could therefore be seen as considerably less inherently biased.

The present project sampled news media posts on Facebook in the lead-up to the 2017 German federal election, and in these …

The next speaker at ECREA 2018 is Deniz Neriman Duru, who begins by highlighting the role of the news media as presenting moral guidelines for their audiences, here especially in the context of the edit framing of the European refugee crisis. This can be studied usefully by examining the linkages between mainstream media framing in and social media reactions to news media articles.

The project collected data on article comments on Facebook in September 2015, at the peak of the refugee crisis, in the pages of Danish news outlets, examining the content of articles and of the threads attached to …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

For instance, does Twitter provide the basis for a public sphere? It is public, interactive, and dynamic, and therefore exhibits some of the basic features of a public sphere; journalists frequently regard it as a representation of the …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, who notes that the current media ecology may no longer guarantee a common ground of information amongst audiences; the diversity of the issues that people consider to be important may be increasing, and this may mean that people no longer agree on a set of common political issues that are important to be addressed in society.

This would mean that we are now seeing the emergence of competing or fragmented public agendas – yet most ness consumption online is still driven by major legacy media, online as well as …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

There are a variety of individual as well as country-level explanations for this. Age, class, gender, and attitudinal reasons (trust in the news, strong ideological positions, perceptions of their own political efficacy) tend to be associated with news avoidance at the individual level; at a …