Session Chair: Steve Jones
Presentation 1
Artifacts, practices and social arrangements in content curation on TikTok: a study on political and social issues content
Carlos Entrena Serrano, Meyer Trisha
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (Centre for Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation--Brussels School of Governance)
In the last twenty years, social media are increasingly relying on recommendation features to increase user engagement and maintain their business logic. Platforms have transitioned from a model where users could explicitly choose content sources, to one based on their inferred algorithmic identities. Users’ agency over their media diets is shaped differently in this new social media paradigm. Platforms such as TikTok, where algorithmic distribution of content is the standard, afford content curation in new avenues.
We build upon previous research on how the TikTok app’s interface design, as a technical artifact, aims to shape consumptive content curation practices at varying degrees of insistence. In this article, we seek to understand how and under what circumstances TikTok affords certain consumptive curation practices to users interested in political and social issues. In other words, how specific users interact with the app’s interface within their social context, focusing on how they adapt their consumptive curation practices to obtain political and social issues content.
Presentation 2
Empowering voters and fostering healthy political discourse: Discursive legitimation by digital media platforms in the context of elections
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mervi Pantti
University of Helsinki, Finland
The role of digital media platforms as societal actors has been increasingly brought to the fore in recent years. We have also grown to understand how platforms foster actors and media formats not motivated by liberal and democratic norms. Critical scholarship has pointed out the role of platforms in amplifying extreme content and misinformation, allowing for the manipulation of political processes and communication, and intervening in the processes of political communication more broadly. In this study, we focus on the discursive strategies adopted by the platforms to publicize and justify their actions related to electoral and political communication on their services. We ask, how do platform companies articulate elections as a context through which they discursively construct their role and legitimacy as major actors in society? Using a large dataset of corporate blogs from ten platform companies (N=27,616, n=413, years 2006-2022) we show a shift from an opportunity-focused discourse that promotes participation, digital democracy, and politician-citizen interaction to a more defensive discourse stressing companies’ responsible attitude to elections, as evidenced by their transparency efforts, advertising control, fact-checking initiatives, and strategic partnerships. Our findings demonstrate an institutionalization of discourses among the platform companies and highlight their reactive response strategies from feature development to corporate legitimation strategies. The platforms strategically mobilize the empowering participation-focused discourses typically used to describe social media to rebuild their legitimacy and position them as proactive agents in society.
Presentation 3
THE POPULISTS’ PLAYGROUND: PARTY CAMPAIGNS ON TIKTOK DURING THE BAVARIAN STATE ELECTIONS 2023
Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, Julia Niemann-Lenz, Constantin Paschertz, Christian Schneider
University of Hamburg, Germany
Political parties have by now embraced social media platforms as valuable tools for election campaigns. Their success in reaching their constituents, however, strongly varies, depending in parts on how well they adapt their communication strategies to the affordances of the respective platform. This adaptation is particularly important for elections below the national level where parties and politicians usually have less resources (whether personnel or money for targeted ads) available to them. While a lot of research has already looked into parties’ efforts (and their effects) on the more “traditional” social media platforms such as X/Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, this paper will explore the still under researched platform TikTok and how it is utilized (and with what success) by German parties during the Bavarian state elections in 2023.
Presentation 4
THE BRAZILIAN DIGITAL BATTLEFIELD: INVESTIGATING THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS IN POST-BOLSONARO ERA
Giada Marino, Bruna Almeida Paroni, Fabio Giglietto
University of Urbino, Italy
The 2022 Brazilian presidential elections and subsequent events highlight a significant period of political polarization and misinformation, particularly on social media platforms like Facebook. This study investigates the dynamics of misinformation campaigns on Facebook in the context of Brazil's political shifts, focusing on the period from the 2022 elections to the aftermath of the attempted coup on January 8, 2023. Utilizing a mixed methods approach and an innovative news alert system, we analyzed three months of links shared in a coordinated fashion leading up to the first anniversary of the attempted coup.
Our findings reveal a bipartisan battlefield of political discourse, with a scenario characterized by divergence in accounts’ political alignment. We, in fact, identified two primary networks of political Facebook accounts: one supporting former President Jair Bolsonaro and another backing President Lula. Interestingly, we observed Lula supporters repeatedly share content criticizing or mocking Bolsonaro, his family members, and his supporters within pro-Bolsonaro groups. Moreover, these posts often receive a substantial number of comments and minor reactions and shares.
Future research will expand on these findings by examining a year's worth of Facebook posts from these networks to explore changes in topics and strategies over time.
The presentation will thus discuss the study's advancement outcomes in-depth, contributing to understanding how Brazilian political factions’ supporters utilize social media to influence public opinion and the implications for democracy in the digital age.
