The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election

The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 US election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the studyies theoretical claim that a platform's network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media

The Problems with Social Media Affordances and Digital Political Campaigning

Social media platforms open up new methods of candidate messaging, voter contact, and data acquisition. Currently, affordances is a popular concept used to study the relationship between political campaigns and how they use social media platforms. Scholars argue that since platforms have different designs, they offer different affordances that affect how campaigns use social media. This chapter evaluates each premise of the affordances argument and shows how it can lead to inaccuracies that are problematic for research. Ultimately, I argue that subtracting the concept of affordances results in a more precise framework to study political campaigning through structure and agency. Exactly how digital campaigning practices take shape will depend on the electoral system, platform structures, and how political actors decide to leverage platform structures to achieve their goals within a given electoral system

Social Media Digital Architectures : A Platform-First Approach to Political Communication and Participation

This chapter outlines the architectural approach to researching digital politics. An architectural approach focuses on platform structures and how they mediate, and can actively affect, users’ political agency online and offline. I first chart the lineage of architectural approaches in the social sciences, from discourse architectures to digital architectures. Then, I describe the process of ‘mapping,’ which theorizes how the functions of social media are built into empirically observable elements of platform design. To illustrate this mapping process, I present four functions of social media and map them onto various features of mainstream social media platforms. The purpose is to show how platform design features can have concrete implications for political processes. Here, the political process under examination is citizens’ political participation. Ultimately, my intent with this chapter is argue against the use of conceptually vague concepts like affordances by providing an alternative and less ambiguous concept – namely, digital architectures

Antisemitismus auf social media und anderen online-plattformen : Ausmaß und kontext

Bisher gibt es kaum Forschung zu digitalen Formen und der Verbreitung von Antisemitismus. Wie in diesem Band gezeigt wird, nimmt jedoch das akademische Interesse an Antisemitismus in sozialen Medien zu. Der Großteil des vorhandenen Wissens zu diesem Thema stammt hauptsächlich aus zwei Arten von Forschung. Bei der ersten handelt es sich um Berichte von Nichtregierungs- und Regierungsstellen, bei der zweiten um wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Umfang des in verschiedenen Online-Bereichen festgestellten Antisemitismus. Während erstere wertvoll sind, um empirische Lücken zu schließen, werden Berichte von Akteuren der Zivilgesellschaft und des öffentlichen Sektors nicht von Expert*innen begutachtet und verfügen in der Regel nicht über die methodische Genauigkeit veröffentlichter wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten. Mittlerweile besteht ein Großteil der bestehenden Forschung in diesem Bereich aus Konferenzbeiträgen, die versuchen,das Ausmaß des Antisemitismus in Online-Bereichen zu quantifizieren oder automatisierte Tools dafür zu entwickeln. Leider ist es aus vier Hauptgründen schwierig, das wahre Ausmaß des Antisemitismus in den sozialen Medien zu messen

Excellent MSc Dissertations 2023

In this eighth edition of the Excellent MSc Dissertation series, five students present condensed versions of their Master’s theses, completed for the MSc degree in Media and Communication Studies at Lund University. These students presented their dissertations in May 2023 and earned the highest mark. During the Fall of 2023, the dissertations were revised to a shorter length of 14,000 words for publication in the series Förtjänstfulla examensarbeten i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (FEA). The series was launched by Media and Communication Studies at Lund University in 2008 to increase the visibility and reward high quality student research. Separately and together, the five contributions in this book exemplify what staff at the Department of Communication and Media consider to comprise an excellent dissertation at the Master’s level. In Chapter 1, L. Leão Alves broadens our understanding of media representation through an analysis of male queer engagement with the popular podcast series My Dad Wrote a Porno. In Chapter 2, Klara Avsec explores the framing and alliance-building strategies of deplatformed far-right activists on Telegram. In Chapter 3, Yunshan Jiang dissects relationships between queer drama series characters and their LGBTQ+ fans through interviews and a poetic analysis of Killing Eve. In Chapter 4, Anna Ledro examines the concept of believability in the Depp v. Heard trial through a content analysis of TikToks and interviews with Gen Z women. In Chapter 5, Mercy Malikwa analyzes the everyday representations and power struggles of female Malawian YouTubers through a document review and production interviews with these content creators. Our aim in publishing this book is to inspire future students to be inquisitive, innovative, and rigorous in their research projects. The ability to understand the social world is uniquely human, and novel perspectives and cases like the ones included here deftly illustrate our knowledge building capacity

Gamification in Politics

Although gamification is a popular term, the concept has rarely been applied to political studies. Therefore, this chapter provides an overview of the key features of gamification and offers an adapted definition of gamification suited to the study of electoral politics. To help illustrate this definition, two examples of gamification from recent campaigns are discussed: the uCampaign mobile application and contests promoted on social media. In concluding, I suggest theoretical and methodological approaches to study gamification in politics moving forward

Cultural racism without race : an exploratory insight into the discrimination and self-perception of the Sweden Democrats

This study presents a fresh, humanistic perspective into the worldview of a rarely studied group: The Sweden Democrats. Having entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010, the Sweden Democrats are a controversial nationalist-populist party, and they are currently the only major party in Sweden rejecting the country’s famed multiculturalism model. The Sweden Democrats, and other Swedes who are openly critical of their country’s immigration and multiculturalism policies, are often stigmatized as ‘racists’ by a number of actors across Swedish society. This essay interprets such stigmatization, as well as other processes of exclusion, as forms of discrimination. Through analyzing the first-hand experiences of these ‘immigration-critical’ Swedes, this study explores who they perceive as actors of discrimination, as well as the specific processes through which these actors enact discrimination. By adopting theoretical and methodological approaches from previous studies of ‘cultural racism’ while avoiding appeals to ‘race’, this paper posits the existence of a ‘cultural racism without race’ in Sweden towards those holding an ‘immigration-critical’ standpoint. The term posited for this relatively unexplored form of discrimination is ‘intra-cultural ethnicism,’ where interpretations of national identity and one’s role in the world take center stage. This study contends that opposing interpretations of ‘Swedishness’ by the two groups lead to incongruous ‘parallel subjective realities’, hindering effective public debate on Sweden’s immigration policies. The study offers an exploratory first step towards understanding how immigration-critical Swedes perceive themselves in relation to their social context. The underlying motivation is that the subjective reality constructions of these Swedes, and those of nationalist-populist party sympathizers in other countries, must be understood and addressed before they are to be merely stigmatized. In the case of Sweden, bridging the gap between the incongruous ‘parallel realities’ of the pro-multiculturalist and immigration-critical Swedes is a necessary condition for effective debate on issues of immigration and multiculturalism

Antisemitism on Social Media Platforms : Placing the Problem into Perspective

This chapter provides a survey of the existing quantitative research on antisemitism and social media. Through doing so, it argues that the sheer quantity of antisemitism on social media is much less than commonly perceived. In addition, the chapter argues that quantitative research often neglects counter-narratives calling out antisemitism, which are an important counterpoint to include in antisemitism research on social media. Then, the chapter discusses how specific components of platform design help explain why antisemitism is likely to surface on some plaftforms but not others. Through this theoretical lens, the chapter compares the design of major social media platforms to online forums. The comparison highlights why memes typically originate in online forums and then are pushed towards more public and mainstream social media platforms. Ultimately, the chapter argues that future research on antisemitism and social media should approach studying antisemitic content across online spaces, with specific attention to the effects of such content on users’ potential for radicalization

FBAdLibrarian and Pykognition: open science tools for the collection and emotion detection of images in Facebook political ads with computer vision

We present a methodological workflow using two open science tools that we developed. The first, FBAdLibrian, collects images from the Facebook Ad Library. The second, Pykognition, simplifies facial and emotion detection in images using computer vision. We provide a methodological workflow for using these tools and apply them to a case study of the 2020 US primary elections. We find that unique images of campaigning candidates are only a fraction (<.1%) of overall ads. Furthermore, we find that candidates most often display happiness and calm in their facial displays, and they rarely attack opponents in image-based ads from their official Facebook pages. When candidates do attack, opponents are portrayed as displaying emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear