Social Media and Politics

Zac McCrary, Partner at Impact Research and host of the Pro Politics podcast, shares his insights on how American campaigns leverage polling and focus groups to craft a winning message. We discuss the upcoming 2022 US midterm elections, the (still) dominant role of television in political advertising, how social media fits into the picture, and how smart phones have changed polling into a multimodal endeavor.

In this episode, it's just me! I present a recently published study, co-authored with Rasmus Schmøkel and published in Political Communication, that analyzes US Presidential campaigns' emotion expression across Facebook and Instagram. I'll explain the theoretical backdrop of the study, give an overview of the state-of-the-art on visual political communication, and communicate the study's methods and key results. Hope you enjoy this one-on-one episode!

Aleszu Bajak, Senior Data Reporter at USA Today, discusses his reporting on social media and politics using computational methods. We talk about the types of data that data journalists are working with, how they acquire it (e.g., Freedom of Information Requests), and how they approach reporting results in a way that tells an engaging story...

Dr. Nils Gustafsson, Senior Lecturer of Strategic Communication at Lund University, discusses the run-up to the 2022 Swedish Elections and then findings from his research. First, we chat about the main political issues that Swedes are voting on, as well as how political parties and party leaders are digital campaigning on social media. Then, Dr. Gustafsson shares findings from three of his research projects...

Prof. Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, discusses his new book The Ministry of Truth: Big Tech's Influence over Facts, Feelings, and Fictions. Prof. Hendricks shares how social media are like investment banks in the attention economy, how information is packaged and sold, and what Big Tech's growing influence on critical infrastructure means for politics and society.

Dr. Tom Paskhalis, Assistant Professor in Political and Data Science at Trinity College Dublin, shares his research on applying machine learning to the Facebook URLs Dataset from Social Science One. The project develops a model to label whether a news domain is credible or not based on Facebook interactions data. We discuss the Facebook URLs dataset, what types of machine learning techniques were applied to it, and how the model performed across the US and EU countries.

Shauna Siggelkow, Director of Digital Storytelling at Define American, discusses a new report on anti-immigration YouTube videos: 'Immigration will Destroy Us and Other Talking Points.' We break down the report, which identifies a network of viral YouTube videos promoting narratives associated with the Great Replacement Theory. Shauna also shares findings from experiments that test how different genres, animation styles, and messengers can effectively communicate political issues.

Dr. Desirée Schmuck, Assistant Professor at the Department of Mass Communication at KU Leuven, shares her research on social media influencers and their effects on users' political attitudes and behavior. We break down three of Dr. Schmuck's studies. The first focuses on how exposure to political influencer content affects young social media users' behavior, both in terms of formal electoral participation and environmental sustainability...

Eric Wilson, Managing Partner at Startup Caucus and Host of The Business of Politics Show, discusses political tech incubators and their emerging role in US digital campaigning. We chat about how the Republican and Democratic Party need different tech solutions for different campaigning styles, the need for start-up campaigning firms, and the potential impact of Web3 on future political campaigns.

Prof. Lance Bennett, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Communication at the University of Washington, discusses the types of principled values that should guide platform regulation. We reflect on the disruptive ethos of tech companies and what that means for democracy. We also discuss theories of capitalism, recent changes in data privacy and third-party tracking, as well as the connection between digital technologies and protest parties.