The far-right’s influence on Twitter during the 2018 Andalusian elections: an approach through political leaders

New technologies allow politicians to spread their messages omitting the role of mediators. In this context, the Internet has also promoted the emergence of a new actor, digital opinion leaders, who go beyond traditional politics and seek to set the public agenda. One of the main questions nowadays is whether social media, and in particular Twitter as a consolidated tool for political communication, is only used as a sounding board for their political statements, spurring the messages of populist forces. With this in mind, the main objective of this research is to explore the influence of the far-right in the public debate of political leaders on Twitter, analyzing the specific case of the Andalusian regional elections held in December 2018. These elections can be considered a political turning point, with an extreme right party winning seats in a Spanish regional election for the first time in 35 years. In this paper we analyze if Vox used a differentiated strategy via this social network compared to the candidates of the traditional parties: PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, and Adelante Andalucía. Using content analysis on Twitter as a method, this research determines how Vox candidates worked as influencers of the digital political debate, despite being extra-parliamentary. Vox marked the agenda for the rest of the leaders, while generating great expectation among the audience

The Neurocognitive Process of Digital Radicalization: A Theoretical Model and Analytical Framework

Recent studies suggest that empathy induced by narrative messages can effectively facilitate persuasion and reduce psychological reactance. Although limited, emerging research on the etiology of radical political behavior has begun to explore the role of narratives in shaping an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, and intentions that culminate in radicalization. The existing studies focus exclusively on the influence of narrative persuasion on an individual, but they overlook the necessity of empathy and that in the absence of empathy, persuasion is not salient. We argue that terrorist organizations are strategic in cultivating empathetic-persuasive messages using audiovisual materials, and disseminating their message within the digital medium. Therefore, in this paper we propose a theoretical model and analytical framework capable of helping us better understand the neurocognitive process of digital radicalization

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

Digital Competence and Family Mediation in the Perception of Online Risk to Adolescents. Analysis of the Montenegro Case Study

Da diversi anni il dibattito scientifico e politico internazionale ha manifestato un interesse sempre più crescente sulla digital literacy e la digital education, quali strumenti di tutela del minore rispetto ai rischi derivanti dall’utilizzo incontrollato e inconsapevole di diversi mezzi di comunicazione. Contemporaneamente, diversi filoni della letteratura scientifica hanno approfondito i temi dei rischi e delle opportunità legate all’utilizzo della rete, da cui spesso sono stati promossi interventi territoriali politici, di sensibilizzazione o di formazione per arginare gli effetti potenzialmente nocivi e incrementare quelli positivi, legati soprattutto alle opportunità di crescita individuale e di inclusione socioculturale che le tecnologie possono contribuire a determinare. Il paper si inserisce all’interno di questo quadro per riflettere sul modo in cui il possesso o meno di alcune competenze digitali possa influenzare o meno il comportamento di fruizione mediale dei giovani, incrementando o meno il rischio di esposizione mediale all’interno di un contesto socioculturale circoscritto. Per intraprendere questo tipo di riflessione, il paper focalizza la propria attenzione sul caso di studio del Montenegro e analizza alcuni risultati della ricerca Eukids on line del 2016, per riflettere sulla relazione fra competenze digitali e livello di rischio espositivo dei bambini compresi fra i 9 e i 17 anni all’interno di aree territoriali socioculturali circoscritte.For several years, international scientific and political debate has shown increasing interest in digital literacy and digital education as tools to protect minors from the risks associated with the unmonitored and unaware use of various media. At the same time, various strains in the scientific literature have more deeply analyzed the themes of the risks and opportunities associated with using the web; this has often resulted in the promotion of political, awareness-raising, or educational interventions on the local level, to contain the potentially harmful effects and augment the positive ones linked especially to the opportunities for individual growth and sociocultural inclusion that these technologies can help bring about. This paper enters into this framework to explore how whether or not digital competence is possessed can influence young people’s media use behaviour, while increasing or not increasing the risk of media exposure within a circumscribed sociocultural context. To undertake this kind of reflection, this paper focuses its attention on the Montenegro case study and analyzes some results of the 2016 Global kids on line research work, to consider the relationship between digital competence and the exposure risk level of children between 12 and 17 years of age within circumscribed sociocultural areas

Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events

The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics. Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital boundaries is still an open challenge. Here we show that online social interactions during a massive voting event can be used to build an accurate map of real-world political parties and electoral ranks. We provide evidence that information flow and collective attention are often driven by a special class of highly influential users, that we name "augmented humans", who exploit thousands of automated agents, also known as bots, for enhancing their online influence. We show that augmented humans generate deep information cascades, to the same extent of news media and other broadcasters, while they uniformly infiltrate across the full range of identified groups. Digital augmentation represents the cyber-physical counterpart of the human desire to acquire power within social systems.Comment: 11 page

Emerging political narratives on Malawian digital spaces

Social media platforms are being considered new podiums for political transformation as political dictatorships supposedly convert to overnight democracies, and many more people are not only able to gain access to information, but also gather and disseminate news from their own perspective. When looking at the situation in several sub-Saharan African countries, it becomes clear there are various challenges restricting social media and its palpable yet considerably constrained ability to influence political and social changes. Access to the internet, or lack thereof, is a recognised social stratification causing a “digital divide” thanks to existing inequalities within African and several other societies throughout the world. This article reports on a study that analysed a popular Facebook page in Malawi using a discursive online ethnographic examination of interactions among social media participants seeking to determine the level of activism and democratic participation taking shape on the Malawian digital space. The study also examined potential bottlenecks restraining effective digital participation in Malawi. The article argues that while social media's potential to transform societies is palpable, keeping up with the pace of transformation is no easy task for both digital and non-digital citizens. The study demonstrated social media's potential but also highlighted the problems facing online activists in Malawi, including chief among them digital illiteracy. Therefore, the digital sphere is not a political podium for everyone in Malawi as shown by the analysis of digital narratives emerging from the country's online environment, which opens its doors to only a tiny fraction of the population

Social Movements and Political Agency in the Digital Age: A Communication Approach

Digital media pose a dual challenge to conventional understandings of political agency. First, digital media destabilize long-held assumptions about the nature of collective action, about social movements and their capacity to effect change. This is because digital media are thought to facilitate more decentralized, dispersed, temporary and individualized forms of political action that subvert the notion of the collective as singular, unified, homogeneous, coherent, and mass. One way of resolving this challenge is to view the collective in looser terms, as a process rather than as a finished product, a conceptualization that can be influence our understanding not only of social movements, but also of other political actors and of society as a whole. Second, digital media highlight the need to take communication seriously in how we conceptualize both collective action and political agency. Placing communication at the centre allows us to develop this looser and more processual understanding of the collective by studying it as a process that is constituted in and through communication. Inspired by organizational communication and particularly the work of Taylor and van Every (2000), this essay proposes a conception of collective action as emerging in conversations and solidified in texts. This conceptualization allows for a more multiplex and variegated view of political agency that takes into account the specific context where agency is exercised and the power that different actors can exert in a communicative process of negotiation, persuasion and claim-making