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This project explores the influence of discursive interactions on driving moral panics by drawing on the theoretical strands of the public sphere and the white racial frame. We apply the framework of the Latino cyber-moral panic to understand online public discourse surrounding the criminalization of undocumented immigrants in the United States. With an ethnographic approach, we find the Internet becomes a cyber public sphere where user's interactions reinforce and are reinforced by a white racial frame; this then contributes to the spread of a moral panic, and ultimately reinforces systemic racism. We argue that social media sites and their discursive tools, such as hashtags, comments, and 'likes,' help to efficiently and continuously target Latino and undocumented immigrants. By weaving communication literature and critical race scholarship, we conceptualize the Internet as a powerful mechanism for the spread of white supremacy and systemic racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pundits disagree on the extent to which hip-hop artists have used their celebrity clout to further the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This study adds to a nascent body of research on Black Twitter by examining how celebrities, in particular, hip-hop celebrities, used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to create and maintain Black identity during the 2014 Ferguson protests related to racial justice and police brutality. Using computerized and manual content analyses of 2.67 million tweets, this study found more celebrity tweets were framed as related to Black identity compared with marketing/self-promotion. Further qualitative analysis of the Black identity-framed tweets revealed four themes: speaking to whites, solidarity, Black is beautiful, and equality. Through a lens of social identity theory, this study demonstrates how hip-hop celebrities used Black Twitter to construct Black identity and community, building on research that shows group identification is fundamental for creating the solidarity and commitment necessary for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constituencies. We find a significant incidence of nationalist sentiments and economic views expressed on Twitter, which persist throughout the campaign and are only offset in the last days when a globalist upsurge brings the British Twittersphere closer to a divide between nationalist and globalist standpoints. Upon combining demographic variables with the classifier scores, we find that the model explains 41% of the variance in the referendum vote, an indication that not only material inequality, but also ideological readjustments have contributed to the outcome of the referendum. We conclude with a discussion of conceptual and methodological challenges in signal-processing social media data as a source for the measurement of public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of past studies’ findings that male politicians usually receive more salient coverage in the traditional media, this study examines whether social media provide a more equal opportunity platform for female politicians to generate users’ engagement and mobilize their supporters. Our study focuses on male versus female politicians’ ability to engage social media users during an election campaign, using the Israeli 2015 campaign as our case study. Female politicians’ posts generated significantly more user engagement in terms of the number of Likes and Shares in comparison to male politicians, while generating the same number of participants in their discussions. The results remained significant in a multilevel analysis, while controlling for other factors such as the politician’s age, party, ranking, and number of posts published by the politician. In terms of the posts’ content, an examination of their rhetoric did not reveal gender differences in their usage of authoritative voice, facts, and the use of emotions in their messages; however, analysis of the topics did suggest differences in the issues raised by male versus female politicians. The evidence strongly indicates that social media provides greater opportunities for female politicians to promote themselves and improve their status in the political power play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest are scattered, and only seldom connect their analyses to more general media ecological frameworks. The article critically reviews and classifies the diverse strands of scholarship that adopt the ecological metaphor in their exploration of activism, and connects them with the more general literature on media and communication ecologies. Moreover, it extracts the constitutive elements of this literature that can help scholars to better address the complexity of communication within social movements, and it articulates four key lessons that a media ecology lens brings to the understanding of media and protest. Finally, the article further demonstrates the strengths of this approach through an illustration of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation on the 15M movement in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the course of a three-year research project comparing social media and political participation across the European Union, we collected data on representative samples of internet users from Germany, Italy and the UK. Online users were surveyed just after the May 2014 European elections. The three countries have been selected as they differ not only in terms of institutional features but also in terms of the character of their media systems: ‘liberal’ in the UK, ‘democratic-corporatist’ in Germany and ‘polarized pluralist’ in Italy. Although previous studies have not put into direct relationship media systems with participatory patterns, we hypothesized that different types of media ecologies may generate peculiar incentives for non-institutional participation. Taking such differences into account, our paper sheds light on the linkage between digital media and unconventional participation across the three countries. Our hypothesis is that distinct news diets and different social media platforms may influence non-institutional participation in specific ways that reflect varying contextual characteristics. We assess the role of different news diets on unconventional participation, distinguishing our respondents according to their main sources of information (occasional, traditional univores, digital univores and omnivores). We then consider the association between the use of different social media (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) and non-institutional participation. Finally, we take into account the indirect effect of national contexts by running interaction models. Our findings show that news diets and social media use matter in the three countries, but that substantial differences are hard to find across them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper adds to the emergent literature on Internet research ethics by exploring the ethical implications of researching the use of Facebook to organize the union flag protests in Northern Ireland in January 2013. These protests were viewed as a ‘lightning rod’ for loyalist dissatisfaction with the peace process, as well as a manifestation of their increasing alienation from their unionist political representatives. The covert observation of the Loyalist Peaceful Protest Updater (LPPU) page in January 2013 found some evidence to support the suggestion that social media had become a ‘sectarian battleground’ during the flag protests. This created an ethical dilemma in terms of what level of anonymity should be afforded to those who posted such content on the page. While there was no requirement to ‘please’ unaware participants, the researcher was wary of inadvertently contributing to the online shaming of loyalists by groups such as Loyalists Against Democracy. Therefore, it was decided to only use direct quotes from public figures, such as the leaders of the flag protest movement, who would presumably have no expectation that their comments would remain private. The narratives of the ‘rank and file’ protesters were conveyed through the use of direct quotes that could not be traced back to their authors and the paraphrasing of their comments. In light of the limitations of alternative strategies such as fabrication and word clouds, this was the most appropriate way to illustrate the themes from the LPPU without distorting the voices of these users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay, I further explicate the construct of affective publics by drawing elements from two case studies, the first focusing on uses of Twitter leading up to and following the events surrounding the resignation of Hosni Mubarak via #egypt, and the second one focusing on online iterations of the Occupy movement, and specifically #ows, one of the more connective and central tags of the movement. I explore what mediated feelings of connectedness do for politics and networked publics in the digital age, and explore their impact on structures of storytelling, sentiment, and the mediality of events broadcast through different platforms. Technologies network us, but it is our stories that connect us. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice. Extending theory on networked publics, we examine how everyday citizens, followed by activists and journalists, influenced the #Ferguson Twitter network with a focus on emergent counterpublic structure and discursive strategy. We stress the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify early initiators of online dissent and story framing. We argue that initiators and their discursive contributions are often missed by methods that collapse longitudinal network data into a single snapshot rather than investigating the dynamic emergence of crowdsourced elites over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In November 2014, the conference ‘Streets to Screens: Mediating conflict through digital networks’ brought together Malachy Browne, news editor atStoryful, Liam Stack, reporter atThe New York Times, and Mohammed Ziyadah, social media editor atBBC Arabicto discuss the ways in which social media content is shaping conflict coverage today. With the proliferation of networked digital devices, the zone of conflict is now more visible than ever before. Eyewitnesses, activists, armed-groups and governments are producing content every day in order to organise, document and communicate events happening on the ground to audiences both near and far. This surge of online voices creates new opportunities and challenges for news media. This discussion explores journalists' everyday practices working with social media, from following events from around the world, to locating sources and amplifying stories. It provides insights into the relationship between journalists and those producing content from within conflict zones, the difficulties of navigating the political agendas of different groups, and the importance of bringing these voices into the news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including social media and war, digital witnessing, and mediating conflict.

This paper explores how social media spaces are occupied, utilized and negotiated by the British Military in relation to the Ministry of Defence's concerns and conceptualizations of risk. It draws on data from the DUN Project to investigate the content and form of social media about defence through the lens of ‘capability’, a term that captures and describes the meaning behind multiple representations of the military institution. But ‘capability’ is also a term that we hijack and extend here, not only in relation to the dominant presence of ‘capability’ as a representational trope and the extent to which it is revealing of a particular management of social media spaces, but also in relation to what our research reveals for the wider digital media landscape and ‘capable’ digital methods. What emerges from our analysis is the existence of powerful, successful and critically long-standing media and reputation management strategies occurring within the techno-economic online structures where the exercising of ‘control’ over the individual – as opposed to the technology – is highly effective. These findings raise critical questions regarding the extent to which ‘control’ and management of social media – both within and beyond the defence sector – may be determined as much by cultural, social, institutional and political influence and infrastructure as the technological economies. At a key moment in social media analysis, then, when attention is turning to the affordances, criticisms and possibilities of data, our research is a pertinent reminder that we should not forget the active management of content that is being similarly, if not equally, effective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The popular microblogging social media platform Twitter has been prominently covered in the press for its perceived role in activism, disaster recovery, and elections amongst other things. In the case of elections, Twitter has been used actively by candidates and voters alike in a diverse range of elections around the world including the 2010 UK elections, the 2012 US presidential elections, and the 2013 Italian elections. However, Twitter has often been found to be a poor predictor of electoral success. This article investigates what role tweets play during elections and whether they are more reactive than predictive. Using the specific case of the 2012 US Republican presidential primary elections, this article explores how candidate's Twitter presence affects electoral outcomes and whether the sentiment and frequency of candidate-related tweets is related to campaign success and offline success at the ballot box. This study finds that tweets were more reactive rather than predictive. Additionally, sentiment analysis revealed that tweets were generally neutral towards candidates. An interesting finding of our study is how candidates used Twitter to generate ‘buzz’, political capital that did not translate to success at the ballot box. We specifically explore how Huntsman's daughters used YouTube videos and tweets that were perceived as a ‘backstage’ look into the campaign and ultimately generated high levels of buzz. Though tweets do not seem to be reflective or predictive of an election campaign offline, they are being used for social media campaigns which can and do get covered by traditional media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication scholars have examined the potential pitfalls and rewards associated with the ability to communicate in online spaces. We continue in that line of research by proposing a mediated moderated communication process model focused on what conditions lead people to engage in aggressive online communication behaviors, otherwise known as flaming. Specifically, we argue that online political discussion socializes individuals to see flaming as an acceptable behavior. This increase in perceived acceptability in turn increases intention to flame. Results demonstrate that this increase in intention to flame is greater among those with high levels of verbal aggression. To test our model, we conducted two surveys that asked students and blog users questions about their online media behaviors. Results replicate across both surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the use of websites and blogs during the 2010 UK anti-cuts protests, where students across the UK occupied more than 35 universities in a symbolic act of opposition to government plans to cut education funding and increase tuition fees. Although social media have largely monopolized the debate on online political activism in recent years, students did not limit their online e-tactics to the use of social media, but used websites and blogs extensively to describe and contextualize their views, demands, protest experiences and actions. This study assesses which of the website features that are usually found in social movement organization (SMO) websites are adopted by websites constructed by loosely organized groups, such as those of the occupying students, and how they differ from SMO websites. The findings show that informational, interactive and mobilizing features were not equally prominent in all occupation websites. Although all standard SMO website features could, to some extent, also be found on the occupying students' websites, the features were emphasized differently. Mobilizing (and some interactive) features played a more prominent role in the occupying students' websites, which tended to lack other customary SMO website functions such as establishing lateral links with other occupation websites. This study discusses the differences in website features and suggests avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the use of social media in political communication, personalized campaigning, and political system and media landscapes in countries including the U.S., Great Britain, Germany.

Although politicians, scholars and campaigners claim that social media such as Facebook and Twitter profoundly change election campaigns, still little is known about the place of social media in the overall campaign mix and its use compared to traditional campaigning channels like the mass media. Cluster analysis of a representative survey among the candidates in the 2011 parliamentary election in Denmark shows that the candidates can be divided into three groups with different campaign mixes: a group which mainly communicates through the traditional mass media, a group which emphasizes social media, and a group which puts low emphasis on media in their campaign. The place of social media in the campaign mix of Danish candidates can be explained by access to the mainstream media and incentives for individual candidates. Traditional media remain the most important communication channel in the Danish campaign, but primarily for candidates who are newsworthy due to their experience and incumbency status. These candidates use social media to generate coverage in the traditional mass media. Challengers and less experienced candidates are more likely to use social media to compensate for lack of attention from the mainstream media, in particular when they are involved in intra-party competition. It is concluded that social media are integrated into Danish campaign mix according to the incentive structure of the electoral system and the media logic which characterizes modern campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media like Facebook and Twitter place the focus on the individual politician rather than the political party, thereby expanding the political arena for increased for personalized campaigning. The need to use social media to communicate a personal image as a politician and to post personalized messages online seems less obvious in a party-centred system such as the Norwegian. Within this framework, the personalized and dialogical aspects of social media may be contradicted by the political parties' structural communication strategies. The article uses data from interviews and status updates from two Norwegian election campaigns and asks for what purposes Norwegian politicians use social media as a tool for political communication. The findings show that politicians' report both marketing and dialogue with voters as motives for their social media use and their practices varied, too. Politicians' reported motive to use social media for marketing purposes was reflected in their actual use. The preferred social media platform for marketing purposes was Facebook. Twitter was more used for continuous dialogue compared to Facebook. Social media marketing was personalized and involved private exposure and individual initiatives. The article concludes by indicating hypotheses and need for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of political activity and campaigning onTwitterin the context of the 2012 election in the Australian state of Queensland. Social media have been a visible component of political campaigning in Australia at least since the 2007 federal election, withTwitter, in particular, rising to greater prominence in the 2010 federal election. At state level, however, they have remained comparatively less important thus far. In this paper, uses ofTwitterin the Queensland campaign from its unofficial start in February through to the election day of 24 March 2012 are tracked. Using innovative methodologies for analysing Twitter activities, developed by the research team, this study examines the overall patterns of activity in the relevant hashtag #qldvotes, and tracks specific interactions between politicians and other users by following some 80 Twitter accounts of sitting members of parliament and alternative candidates. Such analysis provides new insights into the different approaches to social media campaigning which were embraced by specific candidates and party organizations, as well as an indication of the relative importance of social media activities, at present, for state-level election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]