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…
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…
Automated measurement of populist communication across cultures: (how) can it be done? Experience from a Twitter study on high-ranking politicians.
The latest French and American presidential election campaigns provided a splendid opportunity to determine the intercultural relevance of populist discourses. In France, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a right-wing and a left-wing outsider, competed with Emmanuel Macron, a relative newcomer with strong ties to…
How Many Twitterspheres? Agenda-Setting in “Matryoshka Dolls” Social Media
For a long time, academic scholars as well as journalists and political analysts have debated on the risks and the opportunities provided by new technologies, such as Internet and social media, in terms of deliberation and diffusion of news, trends and opinions. This debate has…
Studying Digital Political Campaigns Requires Interdisciplinary Research
Digital campaigns have gained much attention in recent years. Often discussed in the context of elections, online campaigning tools are being regularly used to promote different issues and agendas online. These affordances are being taken up by actors from political parties, governments, campaign groups and…