Search

This conceptual paper wishes to contribute to the debate on digitally mediated movements by developing the perspective of ‘contentious branding’. The empirical research has followed the #Occupy and #Anonymous hashtags around popular social media, reconstructing their highly heterogeneous adoption. A branding perspective on contentious politics is aimed at highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory appropriations of the ‘semiotic repertoires’ of protest movements, particularly apparent within digital networks of communication. A contentious branding perspective on social movements not only tries to fit these specific cases better: it intends to provide an epistemological and methodological device to sustain a non-essentialist understanding of social movements in general, and to face the challenges and opportunities of digital social movement research in particular. The first section of the paper briefly discusses the concepts ‘social movement’ and ‘branding’, characterizing the proposed idea of ‘contentious branding’. Some insights derived from a broader digital exploration on the uses of the hashtags #Occupy and #Anonymous then serve to emphasize their variable, incoherent and at times contradictory utilization: few of the several reiterations of the brand Occupy, deviating from its original use, are presented, and a heuristic categorization of Anonymous’ diverse issues of involvement is proposed. Based on this, the discussion further develops the concept of contentious branding, clarifying its analytical boundaries vis a vis neighboring approaches in social movement theory. The conclusion discusses some of the epistemological and methodological implications that contentious branding bears for the study of social movements in the digital age.

Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, with the drastic reduction of data access via the Facebook APIs following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this data source has essentially become unavailable to academic researchers. Hence, there is a need for different modes of data access for what Freelon (2018) has called the 'post-API age'. One promising approach is to directly collaborate with platform users to ask them to share (parts of) their personal Facebook data with researchers. This paper presents experiences from two studies employing such approaches. The first used a browser plugin to unobtrusively observe Facebook use while users are active. The second asked participants to export and share parts of their personal Facebook data archive. While both approaches yield promising insights suitable to extend or replace self-reports, both also entail specific limitations. We discuss and compare the unique advantages and limitations of both approaches and provide a list of recommendations for future research.

Sharenting, or the practice of sharing one’s parenting or information about one’s children on social media, occurs in an increasingly platformized digital culture, where visual formats are central across participatory and commercial repositories. This paper investigates the articulation between sharenting as performed by celebrities and the wider construction of children’s digital identities. Through qualitative content analysis, this research looks at how Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed individual on Instagram since 2018, his partner, and his mother shared information about his children on that social media platform between 2018 and 2020. Through manual exploration, we searched for Ronaldo’s children across a variety of digital spaces. Our analysis reveals that sharenting on Instagram engages audiences through the portrayal of children as the parents’ extended self. Content from Instagram and news media is appropriated in vernacular and commercial digital spaces for conflicting affects: the cute father-son dyad, and the son as extension of the uber-famous, vain father. This extreme case shows how the digital identities of children of celebrities are widely public, formed by the everyday, intimate content of the family’s life, which is persistent and collectively recreated by news media, vernacular culture, and commercial platforms. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

For some time now, media regulators in Germany and beyond have been trying to cope with the rise of digital intermediaries like social networks and search engines. In this context, the German Network Enforcement Act ('NetzDG') has become the epitome of the concept of new-school speech regulation: the increasing co-optation of intermediaries for governmental content moderation - with all its potential harms to free expression and democratic discourse. Contrary to this trend, however, recent legislative measures in Germany, including the Interstate Media Treaty (IMT), suggest that the country is exploring new avenues in digital intermediary regulation. Not only does the new German legislation focus on procedural instead of substantive aspects of content moderation, offering a case study for concepts promoted by recent literature on platform regulation. By introducing a positive bias for certain 'content of value,' the country also includes the role of beneficial content in its regulation. This paper analyzes the new German countermovement against new-school regulation and presents its potential impact for future regulatory concepts.

The rapid development and dissemination of data analysis techniques permits the creation of ever more intricate algorithmic models. Such models are simultaneously the vehicle and outcome of quantification practices and embody a worldview with associated norms and values. A set of specialist skills is required to create, use, or interpret algorithmic models. The mechanics of an algorithmic model may be hard to comprehend for experts and can be virtually incomprehensible to non-experts. This is of consequence because such black boxing can introduce power asymmetries and may obscure bias. This paper explores the practices through which experts and non-experts determine the credibility of algorithmic models. It concludes that (1) transparency to (non-)experts is at best problematic and at worst unattainable; (2) authoritative models may come to dictate what types of policies are considered feasible; (3) several of the advantages attributed to the use of quantifications do not hold in policy making contexts.

Although previous research has offered important insights into the consequences of mis- and disinformation and the effectiveness of corrective information, we know markedly less about how different types of corrective information ��� news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers ��� can be combined to counter different forms of misinformation. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on experiments in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1,091) that exposed people to evidence-based or fact-free anti-immigration misinformation, fact-checkers and/or a media literacy intervention. The main findings indicate that evidence-based misinformation is seen as more accurate than fact-free misinformation, and the combination of news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers is most effective in lowering issue agreement and perceived accuracy of misinformation across countries. These findings have important implications for journalism practice and policy makers that aim to combat mis- and disinformation.

The idea of post-factual politics has become increasingly relevant for describing current political and societal developments. Though research on the topic has been blooming, we lack a common framework and systematic tool to map and analyze post-truth communication. Therefore, our paper advances the adaptation of claims-making for the analysis of how actors relativize the truth and use discourses of untruthfulness to attack their opponents, constructing their own versions of reality. We extend the affinity between populism and post-truth to conceptualize truth contestation in two aspects: (1) the antagonistic anti-elite constructions of accusations of creating and spreading false information and lies, (2) the emphasis on emotionality and negativity over facts and expertise. Building on a communication-centered approach to populism, we define key content and stylistic characteristics of post-truth claims to study the contestation of truth in political communication in a systematic way. Taking the Twitter communication of Donald Trump as a prime example, we illustrate the employability of our approach via a pilot study on the longest period of shutdown in US history (22 December 2018–25 January 2019). As a result, we introduce claims analysis as an approach that can be usefully adapted to study post-truth discourses.

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central ai...

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of memes created by Palestinians in Israel. An analysis of 150 memes reveals how memes are used to reflect on and intervene in Palestinian youths’ ...

This paper traces the recent turn to humour, irony and ambiguity embodied in the adaptation of memes into the repertoire of online propaganda of the militant neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement; in a process, we dub the ‘memefication’ of white supremacism. Drawing on a combination of quantitative visual content analysis (VCA) and in-depth visual analysis focused on iconography and symbolism, we explore all memes (N = 634) created and circulated by the group around the 2018 general elections in the country. The analysis proceeds in two steps: First, we present the results of the VCA in which we identified five thematic categories of memes crafting white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitic ideas onto esoteric and popular culture iconography then to map these across a matrix of content and form. We then proceed to the analysis of the cluster of memes coded as violent to explore the iconography and symbolism used to promote violence and death threats and render them banal. We draw on a range of recent scholarship on the entanglement of memes in the rise of the far- right and engage critical perspectives on the necropower of fascism to explore the interplay between ambiguous, playful and jokey imagery on the one hand and the murder fantasies and serious threat of white supremacist violence at the heart of neo- Nazi ideology, on the other.

When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global health crisis in early 2020, memes of populist political leaders were disseminated in abundance on social media. At first sight, these political memes satirized and exposed the hazardous actions, appearances and communicative strategies of the populist leaders in this unforeseen situation that not only unsettled existing power balances, but also standard modes of professional and personal conduct. Based on a thematic analysis of memes of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis, this paper finds, however, that the political memes’ critical and affirmative power conflated. This challenged their potential as counter-narratives to the actions and communication of these populist leaders. We argue that this can be explained by an overlap in the communicative form of populism and memes: Political memes are a social media genre that uses incongruent humor to expose the contradictions, conflicts and hypocrisy of populist politicians. Similarly, populist politicians communicate in polarizing and personalizing rhetoric that emphasizes conflicts and the mischiefs of others on social media and beyond. This raises the broader question of how populist leaders might be criticized and their actions subjected to scrutiny in political memes without feeding into their own communicative patterns and logics, and thus unintentionally confirming their worldview and interpretations of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Information, Communication & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)