Description
Increasingly, political communication scholars recognize the need for cross-platform research to better understand social media’s impact on politics. In his talk, Michael Bossetta advocates for a more nuanced understanding of ‘crossing spaces’ in social media research by presenting the findings of two ongoing research studies.Deploying a mix of computer vision and crowd coding, the first study analyzes the visual emotion expressions of American politicians across Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 US elections. The findings challenge the notion that politicians post vastly different content across platforms, while providing evidence that users respond differently to emotions on Facebook and Instagram.
The second study focuses on citizens and their crossing of ideological lines in commenting to political Facebook pages. This study develops the concept of cross-cutting expression as a context-dependent form of online political participation. Using the 2016 Brexit referendum as a case, the study estimates users’ attitudes on the Brexit referendum and charts their patterns of cross-cutting expression. The findings indicate significant content differences in how users engage with like-minded versus counter-attitudinal spaces on Facebook.
Viewed together, the studies nuance our understanding of crossing spaces in social media research on two fronts. First, if political campaigning is not significantly different across platforms, single platform studies may hold more generalizability than previously acknowledged. Second, single platform studies may not have sufficiently considered how citizens cross intra-platform online spaces when engaging in online political participation.
| Period | 2021 Nov 16 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Free University of Berlin, Germany |
| Degree of Recognition | International |