How can we analyze social media discourse and dispute on collective or social memory?
Memory never sleeps. In times of worldwide crisis like the Corona pandemic and climate change, intellectuals debate (again) about the singularity of the Holocaust. Postcolonial historian A. Dirk Moses called the German memory of the Shoah the “Catechism of the Germans” (Moses 2021). Without engaging…
How to survey politicians about their social media perceptions
Many studies focus on how politicians use or present themselves on social media (e.g., see the blogposts by Xénia Farkas and Márton Bene, Kristof Jacobs, Marc Jungblut and Mario Haim, or Peter Maurer). While these and other studies employing content analyses provide deep insights into…
Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Methodological Challenges of Investigating Visual Political Communication on Social Media
Research on politicians’ visual communication strategies on social media has flourished in the past few years (Veneti et al. 2019). This is not surprising, considering that compared with written or spoken texts, images are not only easier to recall, but can convey more specific messages…
Challenges and potentials of visual computational analysis Insights from a study on politicians’ self-depiction and their news portrayal
Visuals are omnipresent in contemporary online political communication. This can be considered a consequence of the development of new and more visual social media platforms such as Instagram, and has been fueled by the increasing mediatization and personalization of political processes. Research from psychology indicates…
A moving target. The methodological challenges of studying political actors on Instagram
Visuals have been part of political communication for a long time. Political TV-advertising, campaign posters, cartoons and even hand gestures have been studied. Over the past five years there has been a substantial increase of studies on visual political communication. Social media in particular seem…
Can we observe public opinion on Twitter?
Twitter data can provide a glimpse into public opinion, but a distorted one. This is the main finding of a recent study we conducted that compares Twitter data with polling data and election results. In times when response rates in survey research decline, and those…
Into the wild. Striving for high ecological validity in experimental social media studies – Is it worth it?
During the Covid-19 outbreak, the spread of false information on social media has often been linked to citizens’ motivation to participate in protests against lock-down measures of governments or to attend ‘corona parties’. Although such relationships may exist, we should be aware that spread of (dis-)information does…
How young adults use and perceive news in modern information environments—and how we can investigate it.
Young adults today live in a completely different media environment than their parents and grandparents—long gone is the time when media use was confined to selected times, places, providers, and modes of access. These changes not only affect how people watch movies or TV series…
Twitter naming and shaming, Facebook anger activation and… data access.
Even though Obama had already been labeled ‘the social media president’, ever since the Trump election and Brexit referendum researchers, campaigners and pundits alike have been wondering to what extent social media help win elections. Most of the pundits at least seem to buy the…
Why Data Tracking Provides a Much Less Accurate Picture of Media Exposure than Often Assumed
Most of what we know about politics, we know from the media. We get most of our information about political issues, actors, and opinions there, which makes the media an important influencing factor on public opinion. Nowadays, this applies also to social media to an…