The Geopolitics of Deplatforming:A Study of Suspensions of Politically-Interested Iranian Accounts on Twitter

Social media companies increasingly play a role in regulating freedom of speech. Debates over ideological motivations behind suspension policies of major platforms are on the rise. This study contributes to this ongoing debate by looking at content moderation from a geopolitical perspective. The starting premise is that US-based social media companies may be inclined to moderate content on their platforms in compliance with US sanctions laws, especially those concerned with the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Despite the release of transparency reports by social media companies, we know little about the scope of the problem and the impact of suspensions on political conversations. I tracked 600,000 users who follow Iranian elites on Twitter. After accounting for alternative explanations, the results show that Principlist (conservative) users and those supportive of the Iranian government are significantly more likely to be suspended. Further analyses uncover the types of discussions that are being suppressed as a result of these suspensions. Although the exact mechanism at hand cannot be decisively isolated, this paper contributes to building a better understanding of how governments can influence conversations of geopolitical relevance, and how social media suspensions shape political conversations online

Affective Action in Organizations: Social Media, Personalized Communication and Advocacy in the European Union

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018Civil society organizations such as citizen groups and NGOs are the cornerstone of democratic pluralism but face a significant engagement problem: people are more interested in unconventional forms of participation than in participating in formal groups. The literature on digital media and collective action argues that social media should partially solve the problem by allowing the public to participate in organizations in a more personalized way. However, we still know little about which groups are more likely to use social media for public engagement, and which types of frames are more likely to engage the current individualized public. I aim to fill this gap in the literature by presenting and testing a theory of Affective Action in Organizations. I portray social media engagement with civil society groups as a function of their public dependence, the types of messages they promote, and the emotions these messages evoke. I build on existing political psychology models to argue that two emotions related to people’s dispositional system (enthusiasm and anger) and one emotion related to the surveillance system (anxiety) explain in part why people decide to engage with civil society groups online. I empirically test the argument by studying how Twitter users interact with hundreds of civil society organizations advocating in the European Union

Large-Scale Computerized Text Analysis in Political Science: Opportunities and Challenges

Text has always been an important data source in political science. What has changed in recent years is the feasibility of investigating large amounts of text quantitatively. The internet provides political scientists with more data than their mentors could have imagined, and the research community is providing accessible text analysis software packages, along with training and support. As a result, text as data research is beginning to mainstream in political science. Scholars are tapping new data sources, they are employing more diverse methods, and they are becoming critical consumers of findings based on those methods. In this article, we first introduce readers to the subject by describing the four stages of a typical text as data project. We then review recent political science applications, and explore one important methodological challenge - topic model instability - in greater detail

A Delicate Balance: Republican Party Branding During the 2013 Government Shutdown

Strong party brands help congressional parties elect candidates, maintain or gain majority control, and advance their policy agendas. Because successful branding efforts depend on consistent messaging, party leaders try to choose issues that most members are willing to promote. But what do leaders do when a party majority pressures them to take up issues that harm the brand for others? We investigate the 2013 government shutdown as a branding event. House Republican leaders instigated the shutdown after learning that a majority of Republicans would not vote for a clean funding bill. However, instead of highlighting the issues that led to the shutdown, they publicized the party's efforts to resolve it. Party leaders sought to exploit the fact that party brands have both position and valence components to simultaneously address the demands of the party base and the electoral concerns of members representing competitive districts

Mass protest. Chaotic Message? The interaction between the Spanish Indignados movement and the mass-media

In May 2011, thousands of outraged citizens (i.e. the indignados) occupied the squares of the main Spanish cities to express their discontent and claim for reforms. This article investigates via Twitter messages the ability of the 15-M movement to place their claims into the media agenda and to keep ownership of their own discourse. The analysis emphasizes the fact that the social movement originated in the Internet with a highly decentralized structure and with scarce organizational resources. Results show that protesters discourse included a great number of claims, although the activists focused their discussions on three specific issues: electoral and party systems, democracy and governance, and finally, civil liberties. Moreover, the study reveals that the indignados managed to keep control over their repertoires and were able to determine the media agenda despite the later mainly focused on the most dramatic events

Large-Scale Computerized Text Analysis in Political Science: Opportunities and Challenges

Text has always been an important data source in political science. What has changed in recent years is the feasibility of investigating large amounts of text quantitatively. The internet provides political scientists with more data than their mentors could have imagined, and the research community is providing accessible text analysis software packages, along with training and support. As a result, text as data research is beginning to mainstream in political science. Scholars are tapping new data sources, they are employing more diverse methods, and they are becoming critical consumers of findings based on those methods. In this article, we first introduce readers to the subject by describing the four stages of a typical text as data project. We then review recent political science applications, and explore one important methodological challenge - topic model instability - in greater detail

A Delicate Balance: Republican Party Branding During the 2013 Government Shutdown

Strong party brands help congressional parties elect candidates, maintain or gain majority control, and advance their policy agendas. Because successful branding efforts depend on consistent messaging, party leaders try to choose issues that most members are willing to promote. But what do leaders do when a party majority pressures them to take up issues that harm the brand for others? We investigate the 2013 government shutdown as a branding event. House Republican leaders instigated the shutdown after learning that a majority of Republicans would not vote for a clean funding bill. However, instead of highlighting the issues that led to the shutdown, they publicized the party's efforts to resolve it. Party leaders sought to exploit the fact that party brands have both position and valence components to simultaneously address the demands of the party base and the electoral concerns of members representing competitive districts

Images That Matter: Online Protests and the Mobilizing Role of Pictures

Do images affect online political mobilization? If so, how? These questions are of fundamental importance to scholars of social movements, contentious politics, and political behavior generally. However, little prior work has systematically addressed the role of images in mobilizing online participation in social movements. We first confirm that images have a positive mobilizing effect in the context of online protest activity. We then argue that images are mobilizing because they trigger stronger emotional reactions than text. Building on existing political psychology models we theorize that images evoking enthusiasm, anger, and fear should be particularly mobilizing, while sadness should be demobilizing. We test the argument through a study of Twitter activity related to a Black Lives Matter protest. We find that both images in general and some of the proposed emotional attributes (enthusiasm and fear) contribute to online participation. The results hold when controlling for alternative theoretical mechanisms for why images should be mobilizing, as well as for the presence of frequent image features. Our paper thus provides evidence supporting the broad argument that images increase the likelihood of a protest to spread online while also teasing out the mechanisms at play in a new media environment