Vaikutusvalta verkossa ja neuvottelupöydissä : Tapaustutkimus Suomen ilmastopolitiikan verkostosta

Tämä maisterintutkielma tarkastelee vaikutusvaltaisuuden muodostumista politiikkaverkostoissa Twitter-datan avulla. Toimijoiden vaikutusvaltaisuus on laajan kiinnostuksen kohde politiikkaverkostojen tutkimuksessa, koska sillä on nähty olevan suurta merkitystä poliittisten linjausten muodostamisessa. Verkostojen vaikutusvallan mittaamisen ollessa hankalaa, sosiaalisesta mediasta kerätty data tarjoaa suurta potentiaalia toimijoiden vaikutusvallasta tehtävän tutkimuksen laajentamiseen. Tämä tutkielma tekee kaksi kontribuutiota politiikan tutkimuksen alalla. Ensinnäkin sen tavoitteena on tarkastella, heijastuuko vaikutusvaltaisuus tosielämän politiikkaverkostoissa vaikutusvaltaan Twitter-verkostoissa. Analyysissä tosielämän vaikutusvaltaa mitataan sekä formaalina päätöksentekovaltana, että epävirallisena, maineeseen perustuvana vaikutusvaltana. Twitter-verkostoissa vaikutusvaltaa mitataan toimijan keskeisenä sijaintina verkostossa. Toiseksi tutkielmassa syvennytään siihen, miten vaikutusvaltaa käytetään sosiaalisessa mediassa. Analyysissä tarkastellaan, saavatko suositut käyttäjät enemmän verkostoyhteyksiä ja kasvattavatko yhteydet vaikutusvaltaisiin verkostojäseniin toimijoiden vaikutusvaltaa Twitterissä. Suomen ilmastopolitiikan verkosto toimii tutkielman empiirisenä tutkimuskohteena. Analyysi yhdistää kaksi aineistoa, kyselytutkimuksen, jossa on kartoitettu verkoston osallistujien itsensä käsityksiä eri toimijoiden vaikutusvaltaisuudesta, ja Twitter-aineiston, joka sisältää toimijoiden välisiä uudelleentwiittauksia (retweet) Twitterissä. Analyysin selitettävä muuttuja on retweet-verkoston yhteys kahden toimijan välillä. Verkostoyhteyksiä tutkitaan exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) tilastomenetelmän avulla. ERGM-menetelmä mallintaa yhteyksien ilmentymistä ottaen samanaikaisesti huomioon sekä vaikutusvaltaisuuden toimijatasolla, että muita yhteyksien muodostumiseen vaikuttavia tekijöitä verkostotasolla. Tutkielman pääasialliset tulokset ovat: (1) Toimijat, joita pidetään vaikutusvaltaisina politiikkaverkostossa ovat vaikutusvaltaisia myös Twitter-verkostossa; (2) Formaali päätöksentekovalta, jota esimerkiksi puolueet, valtion virastot ja ministeriöt edustavat, ei ole kytköksissä Twitter-vaikutusvaltaan; (3) Suositut käyttäjät saavat enemmän Twitter-yhteyksiä keskeisen aseman tuoman statuksen myötä; (4) yhteydet politiikkaverkoston vaikutusvaltaisilta toimijoilta eivät lisää käyttäjän vaikutusvaltaa sosiaalisessa mediassa. Tämä tutkielma osoittaa, että verkostotoimijoiden välistä vaikutusvaltaa voi tarkastella sosiaalisesta mediasta kerättyä dataa käyttäen. Tulokset havainnollistavat myös, että vaikutusvalta muodostuu toimijoiden välisessä kanssakäymisessä. Sosiaalisen median yhteyksiä ei voida kuitenkaan pitää täysin yhteensopivana mittarina tosielämän vaikutusvallalle, sillä yhteydet vaikutusvaltaisiin toimijoihin eivät johtaneet keskeisempään asemaan Twitter-verkostossa.This master’s thesis investigates whether and how influence in policy networks can be studied with Twitter data. Actor influence is of vast interest to policy scholars, as it has been seen to have a notable impact on forming public policies. However, measuring influence is complex, which can limit the scope of research on influence in policy. Exploring social media sources has great potential for providing alternative data for studies concerned with actor influence in policy processes. This study makes two contributions to the field of policy studies. Firstly, it examines whether the influence in real-life policy networks corresponds to the influence in Twitter networks. In the analysis, offline influence is measured as formal decision-making power and informal, reputation-based influence. Online influence is measured by actor centrality on Twitter. Secondly, it looks more closely at how influencing works in online networks. The analysis examines how network interactions affect online influence and whether connections from actors influential in the offline policy network add to an actor's influence on social media. The empirical object of this thesis is the case of the Finnish climate policy network. The analysis is conducted by combining two data sets: offline influence perceptions reported by the network members in a survey and Twitter data consisting of retweets between the same network actors. An actor retweeting another on Twitter is the dependent variable in the analysis. Tie formation in the network is explored with exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) that allows modeling the tie formation patterns on Twitter conditional on actor influence while accounting for other factors posited to contribute to tie formation. The main results are as follows. (1) Actors that are perceived as the most influential in the offline policy network are also the most influential on Twitter; (2) Having formal powers, such as being a government agency, is not associated with more incoming ties online; (3) Being influential online begets even more ties due to the status granted by the central position and (4) having online ties from actors that are influential offline does not add to an actor’s influence. This thesis shows that influence amongst policy network actors can be studied using social media data. The results also have practical implications by demonstrating that actor influence is constructed in interaction over time. The fact that ties from influential actors did not lead to more incoming ties implies that social media centrality cannot be fully equated with real-life influence. These results encourage policy network researchers to continue exploring the use of observable digital networks in research on actor influence

The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. have their own logics, dynamics and different audiences. This book analyses how the users of these social networks, especially those of YouTube and Instagram, become content prescribers, opinion leaders and, by extension, people of influence. What influence capacity do they have? Why are intimate or personal aspects shared with unknown people? Who are the big beneficiaries? How much is vanity and how much altruism? What business is behind these social networks? What dangers do they contain? What volume of business can we estimate they generate? How are they transforming cultural industries? What legislation is applied? How does the legislation affect these communications when they are sponsored? Is the privacy of users violated with the data obtained? Who is the owner of the content? Are they to blame for ""fake news""? In this changing, challenging and intriguing environment, The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing discusses all of these questions and more. Considering this complexity from different perspectives: technological, economic, sociological, psychological and legal, the book combines the visions of several experts from the academic world and provides a structured framework with a wide approach to understand the new era of influencing, including the dark sides of it. It will be of direct interest to marketing scholars and researchers while also relevant to many other areas affected by the phenomenon of social media influence

Changing images? Italian Twitter discourse on China and the United States during the first wave of COVID-19

Although public diplomacy and its influence on foreign public opinion have been central themes in recent research, the latter often lacks methodological diversity and does not consider how states create competing images. Our study offers a framework for understanding Italian public opinion using a triangulation approach that combines traditional public opinion surveys with advanced text analysis of social media content. We compare the representation of China and the United States in the Italian Twitter community during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis shows that Italians who perceived China as a viable alternative to Western governments in public opinion surveys did so because they distrusted Western leaders and institutions

Regulating Content on Social Media

How are users influenced by social media platforms when they generate content, and does this influence affect users’ compliance with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analysing how the behaviours of social media users are regulated from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan, an internet governance specialist, compares copyright laws on selected social media platforms, namely Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users. Through a case study detailing the content generative activities undertaken by a hypothetical user named Jane Doe, as well as drawing from empirical studies, the book argues that – in spite of copyright’s purported regulation of certain behaviours – users are 'nudged' by the social media platforms themselves to behave in ways that may be inconsistent with copyright laws

How Twitter Exposes Daily Whiteness Practices in Mexico and Argentina

This dissertation questions: How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Mexico produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Argentina produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How are the social imaginaries in Twitter Discourse in Mexico and Argentina related to the cultural and symbolic power exercised by the United States, and does US power influence the structure of privileges built around Whiteness? For doing that, I collected up to 10K tweets using two keywords to identify discourses surrounding Whiteness in tweets from users in Mexico and Argentina and analyzed up to 300 tweets per keyword using Critical Discourse Analysis tools. The findings demonstrate that research on Twitter is valid to explore communities from inside and interpret problems that go beyond digital environments. Furthermore, Twitter provides a unique opportunity to review Whiteness and question its privilege structures. In addition, the tweets operate as a cultural manifestation of the latent social unrest gruesomely exposing racism, dehumanization, eliminationism, and contempt for otherness favored by the affordances of the medium. My approach focused on Argentina and Mexico tweets as selected cases able to reflect the reality of the region in order to explore the function of Whiteness in everyday conversations, considering the impact of digital technologies in society. Both countries represent well-differentiated social structures, and embody particular ways of living ethnicity, cultural capitalism, and globalization. Although to be considered \u27white\u27 in Argentina is not the same as in Mexico, they also retain certain identity features related to conceptions of Whiteness that allow its study. Even more interesting, I found that studying Whiteness in these two countries also illustrated the influence of the United States as a cultural and symbolic power in the development of white supremacist ideas

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

Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics

Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function

Far-Right Digital Activism in Polarized Contexts: A Comparative Analysis of Engagement in Hashtag Wars

Literature on influence operations highlights the coordinated actions of digital activists aimed at persuading audiences. Scholars have discussed many angles of this behavior and emphasized repertoires based on specific contentious actions. However, little is discussed about how these disputes allow us to apprehend different models of political action in polarized contexts. On a whole, studies have not considered a broader understanding of digital activism performed by supporters of far-right governments. How does the far-right spread its agenda and support the government in “hashtag wars”? What kind of strategies are employed? This study seeks to compare patterns of coordinated behavior in hashtags created by supporters and detractors of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil that occupied the trending topics on Twitter. The statistical analysis is based on 6.1 million tweets taken from 20 political hashtags collected over a three-month period from May to July 2020. Data was scraped using Twitter’s Search API v3.0 for academic use. We analyzed the overall volume and peaks of tweets, the users they engaged with, and their network of influence, as well as the length of each hashtag. The results show an intense use of hashtag activism by Bolsonaro supporters, with users struggling for greater prominence in social media in the face of political events in Brazil. This article sheds light on how the far-right appropriates digital platforms to promote the government’s public image in times of political tension and how it promotes coordinated actions aimed at framing social media audiences