Social Media and Politics

Latest Episodes:

Pro-Trump Social Networks: The Donald on Reddit and TheDonald.win Dec 03, 2019

Show notes

A moderator of Reddit's The Donald guests to discuss the notorious subreddit community, and the new pro-Trump online forum: TheDonald.win. We discuss the role of memes in these online forums, how memes are used for redpilling, and the steps Reddit has taken to limit the reach of pro-Trump social networks.

Political Advertising on Facebook and Television, with Prof. Travis Ridout Nov 24, 2019

Show notes

Prof. Travis Ridout, Distinguished Professor of Government and Politics at Washington State University, guests to discuss a new study examining American campaigns' political advertising on Facebook and television in the 2018 US midterm elections. We break down some of the key differences between the two media in terms of who is more likely to use Facebook advertising, when and where online ads are most likely to occur, and how the topics and tone of ads across the two media differ.

Read the full study here!

Warren's Meme Team, with Misha Leybovich Nov 17, 2019

Show notes

Misha Leybovich, Organizer for Warren's Meme Team, guests to discuss how memetic templates can be used for grassroots political campaigning. We break down the plan for Warren's Meme Team, its focus on augmented reality (AR) lenses, and what the response to the initiative has been like so far.

Read the full plan here.

Political Self-Expression on Social Media, with Dr. Dan Lane Oct 27, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Dan Lane, Assistant Professor of Communication at UC Santa Barbara, guests to discuss his research on how political self-expression influences citizens' perceptions of their political selves as citizens. We also talk about how certain design features of social media seem to affect youth political expression, and how different acts of self-expression can influence political self concepts to varying degrees.

Here are the three studies we discussed in the episode:

Protest, Participation, and Cross-Cutting Exposure on Social Media, with Dr. Sebastian Valenzuela Oct 06, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Sebastian Valenzuela, Associate Professor of Communication at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, guests to discuss two studies on how social media impact political participation.

The first study demonstrates how both Facebook and Twitter contribute to protest participation, but they do so through different pathways that relate to strong and weak tie social networks.

The second study is a meta-analysis of existing research, and it explores whether exposure to cross-cutting information affects political participation.

Both studies are published in Political Communication, and you can read them here:

1) Ties, Likes, and Tweets: Using Strong and Weak Ties to Explain Differences in Protest Participation Across Facebook and Twitter Use

2) A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Cross-Cutting Exposure on Political Participation

Data Science Tools for the 2020 Census, with Chris Dick Sep 22, 2019

Show notes

Chris Dick, Director of Applied Data Science at Civis Analytics, guests to discuss how data science approaches are being used to increase participation in the 2020 US Census.

We talk about some of the political and financial challenges facing the census, what types of data are being used models of hard-to-count communities, and how different types of messaging can either increase or decrease Census response rates.

Learn more about the Civis Census Intelligence Center here!

Tracking Attention on Social Media for the 2020 Democratic Primaries, with Neal Rothschild Sep 08, 2019

Show notes

Neal Rothschild, Associate Director of Growth at Axios, guests to discuss the Axios-NewsWhip 2020 Attention Tracker. The attention tracker monitors candidate and issue mentions across Facebook and Twitter, and we talk about how the technology is used in Axios's reporting of the 2020 Democratic Primaries.

Fake News, Disinformation, and Social Media Campaigning in Norway, with Dr. Bente Kalsnes Aug 25, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Bente Kalsnes, Associate Professor of Communication at Kristiania University College, guests to discuss her new book "Fake News: Lies, Disinformation, and Propaganda in the Digital Public Sphere." We also break down politicians' social media campaigning in Norway, how this campaigning is changing ahead of the 2019 local elections, and look at some early Norwegian social media sites that predated Facebook

Making Memes to Support Donald Trump, with Carpe Donktum Aug 11, 2019

Show notes

Carpe Donktum, the pseudonym for a citizen who makes memes to support Donald Trump, guests to discuss his work. We talk about some of the memes that the President has retweeted on Twitter, as well as differences in meme making cultures across Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan.

Here are the memes discussed in the episode:

NPC Infowars Winner
State of the Union
Biden Meme
Acosta Meme

And, a link to my paper on political campaigns' use of computer games!

Natural Language Processing with Social Media Data, with Dr. Leon Derczynski Jul 28, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Leon Derczynski, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the IT University of Copenhagen, guests to discuss how natural language processing and computational linguistics can be applied to social media data.

We break down several of Dr. Derczynski's EU-funded research projects, from detecting the informativeness of tweets in crisis communication to assessing the veracity of claims through comment patterns on Twitter and Reddit.

Dr. Derczynski also shares his thoughts on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deepfake detection.

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