Social Media and Politics

Dr. Dan Lane, Assistant Professor of Communication at UC Santa Barbara, guests to discuss his research on how political self-expression influences citizens' perceptions of their political selves as citizens. We also talk about how certain design features of social media seem to affect youth political expression, and how different acts of self-expression can influence political self concepts to varying degrees.

Dr. Sebastian Valenzuela, Associate Professor of Communication at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, guests to discuss two studies on how social media impact political participation. The first study demonstrates how both Facebook and Twitter contribute to protest participation, but they do so through different pathways that relate to strong and weak tie social networks...

Chris Dick, Director of Applied Data Science at Civis Analytics, guests to discuss how data science approaches are being used to increase participation rates in the 2020 US Census. We talk about some of the political and financial challenges facing the census, what types of data are being used models of hard-to-count communities, and how different types of messaging can either increase or decrease Census response rates.

Neal Rothschild, Associate Director of Growth at Axios, guests to discuss the Axios-NewsWhip 2020 Attention Tracker. The attention tracker monitors candidate and issue mentions across Facebook and Twitter, and we talk about how the technology is used in Axios's reporting of the 2020 Democratic Primaries.

Dr. Bente Kalsnes, Associate Professor of Communication at Kristiania University College, guests to discuss her new book "Fake News: Lies, Disinformation, and Propaganda in the Digital Public Sphere." We also break down politicians' social media campaigning in Norway, how this campaigning is changing ahead of the 2019 local elections, and take a look at some early Norwegian social media sites that predated Facebook.

Carpe Donktum, the pseudonym for a citizen who makes memes to support Donald Trump, guests to discuss his work. We talk about some of the memes that the President has retweeted on Twitter, as well as differences in meme making cultures across Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. We also dive into the the media response to these memes, and Carpe Donktum's thoughts on deepfakes and manipulated videos.

Dr. Leon Derczynski, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the IT University of Copenhagen, guests to discuss how natural language processing and computational linguistics can be applied to social media data. We break down several of Dr. Derczynski's research projects, from detecting the informativeness of tweets in crisis communication to assessing the veracity of claims through comment patterns on Twitter and Reddit. Dr...

José van Dijck, Distinguished Professor in Media and Society at Utrecht University, guests to discuss her latest book, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford University Press). We break down key concepts from the book, including Platform Societies and Platform Power. We discuss the importance of public values in the Platform Society, and how these values might differ across the United States, the European Union, and China. Dr...

Alexandra Ekkelenkamp, Advisor to the Director of Media and Communications at the Council of the European Union, discusses how the EU Council uses social media for strategic communication. We talk about how social media campaigns reflect the Council's work, how that creates authenticity, and how to incorporate local versus European narratives when communicating to the EU public. Alexandra also shares her work for Donald Tusk's personal social media account, and in particular Instagram...

Loren Merchan and Jonathan Barnes guest to discuss the concept of authenticity and authentic campaigns in US elections. We break down the concept of authenticity, and discuss how digital and social media can be leveraged to make a candidate seem more authentic during a campaign.