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…
Why social media might tell us quite a lot about identity
While there are clear limitations to what social media can tell us about public opinion in general (see blogs by de Wilde and Magin), social media platforms can be rich fields for studying processes of identity formation and communication of the kind that do eventually…
A case of throwing the baby with the bathwater: Facebook API restrictions
Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there has been an ongoing debate about the privacy of social media data and ethical use of them. The role of Cambridge Analytica in the outcome of Brexit Referendum and the US presidential election is not crystal clear but…
The way fake news is addressed might be more dangerous than fake news
“We live in a post-truth era.” “Democracy is experiencing a sudden crisis of truth.” This narrative is increasingly used to describe our current situation. In response to this proclaimed crisis, policy-makers around the world have turned to rather radical solutions in their quest to save…
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…
Why Social Media Data Don’t Tell Us Very Much About Public Opinion
When social scientists want to learn something about public opinion, they traditionally conduct surveys, using representative samples. Representativity means that even with relatively small numbers of participants, if selected at random, the opinions expressed by the sample can be generalized to the population as a…
Four Reasons Europeans Need Not Be So Afraid That Their Elections Will Be Manipulated Through Social Media
Many Europeans are afraid that democratic elections might be manipulated through social media. The Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal has installed a fear that voters could be targeted through their social media accounts and that votes could be swayed through micro targeted adds and campaigns. There are, however, four reasons to believe that we do not need to be afraid.