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Tensions are usually high during political campaign periods in Nigeria as politicians seek to influence the electorates to their favour. In the process, they express sentiments that sometimes threaten or disparage their opponents. Online media platforms have been one of the most adopted means for politicians, leading to political cyberbullying. This study focused on online media audience awareness and response to political cyberbullying and its implication to development in Nigeria. The study had two objectives on the awareness level and response to the issue. The researchers anchored the study on the Selective Processes Theory, and approached it through qualitative survey research design. There were 224 respondents drawn from online media users in Nigeria. A Google designed form was administered through emails and WhatsApp platforms. The study adopted the four-point Likert scale format with 2.5 as the criterion for decision. The researchers found out that online media audience is averagely aware (3.26 AWMS) of political cyberbullying in Nigeria. Secondly, the respondents have a high negative perception (3.56 AWMS) about political cyberbullying, which is good for development. It was therefore concluded that with the knowledge and perception, politicians may not benefit from political cyberbullying in the future. The study recommends that mainstream media should increase anti-political cyberbullying campaign through its online media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok's platform features impact user engagement. Results reveal that party youth organizations had a prominent presence during the campaign, while traditional party actors were less established. TikTok tends to lean toward right-wing content, with right-wing praise being a significant predictor of user engagement. Semiotic resources such as stickers and emoticons but also added music, were widely used platform features, but these features had no or weak negative effects on user engagement. Added speech, particularly when praising right-wing politics, positively influenced user engagement, suggesting the importance of verbal communication on a platform characterized by multimodal experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a corpus-assisted analysis of the rhetoric employed in the political tweets of Lauren Boebert and Isabel Díaz-Ayuso on the micro-blogging site X (formerly Twitter). This study adopts the analytical framework Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), to explore how these politicians utilize negativity as a strategic tool to discredit and weaken their adversaries. The research identifies key motifs and evaluative strategies within their tweets, illustrating the role of negativity in political discourse. Findings reveal that both politicians direct their negativity toward their political rivals, viz., presidents Joe Biden and Pedro Sánchez, while channeling it towards immigrants and independentist parties. Amongst the evaluative resources most commonly deployed, Lauren Boebert and Isabel Díaz-Ayuso utilize inscribed negative judgments of propriety and veracity to accuse their rivals based on their lack of morality and truthfulness regarding various policy issues. The qualitative study has also revealed that politicians present their stances through monoglossic formulations that leave no room for argumentation and debate. This idea reinforces that even if their negativity is not intended as a polarizing agent, it may affect the potential electorate. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of online political communication, highlighting the implications of negativity in shaping public opinion and political narratives1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic caused global disruption in 2020, throwing the world into an unprecedented health crisis with unpredicted socio-economic consequences. Strikingly, politicians and supranational organizations failed to collaborate and coordinate a united global response. In light of this, this research study explores how the vaccine race may have been used as a weapon of political communication, constantly influenced by international relations and economic interests. This study analyses the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how the vaccine development was used to support Trump’s political discourse to gain international political leadership amidst the electoral campaign to become reelected. The core research findings show that President Trump’s administration started politicizing vaccine developments as the country became immersed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Furthermore, the reviewed literature and the empirical evidence suggest that advancements in the country’s pharmaceutical sector and the development of the COVID-19 vaccine were used as a communication weapon to affect Trump’s political campaign and the global COVID-19 vaccine race.

The use of social media for activism has become a growing trend in Ghana and Africa. Although there have been several studies on how social media is used for activism to address socio-political issues, most of these studies have focused on using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In contrast, video-based platforms such as YouTube have received less attention from researchers. Employing framing theory and content analysis of comments on some selected YouTube videos about Kamala Harris’ statements on promoting LGBTI + rights in Ghana, the study shows that Ghanaian audiences engaged with the content to express their resistance to the promotion of this agenda. The findings revealed that three main issues surrounding her statements attracted the most audiences’ attention, who used the YouTube comment section to express their resistance. The issues included: 1) the promotion of LGBTI + rights in Ghana, as suggested by Kamala Harris; 2) the response of the President of Ghana to the country’s position on the matter; and 3) the colorful light display on the Jubilee House. This article has implications for scholarship on gender and sexuality studies and the discourse on online activism.

AbstractThis study aims to examine the interplay between political communication and discursive practices in the emerging new media landscape after the recent political reform in Ethiopia. The study employs interpretative textual analysis in qualitative research approach to analyze political communication texts posted by political party leaders and activists’ official pages through Critical Discourse Analysis. By using this method, the study critically examines the recent political developments with a specific focus on: EPRDF fragmentation, disintegration of TPLF from the central government, de-facto state formation, the integration of PP into political scene, inter-party political dialogues, and election scenarios among purposely selected ethno-nationalist and unionist political party leaders and activists’ official pages. The finding of the study reveals that political actors used social media as a political communication backchannel and a counter-hegemonic space to construct their political identities and ideologies. The result further shows ethnic identity has overwhelmingly become the source of power over pan-Ethiopian nationalism identity. The politics of ethnic belongingness is found to be an emerging political communication discourse in the study. Ethnic divisions and polarized political views have been recurrently propounded among political actor’s posts in their digital media. Accordingly, accommodative discursive strategies appear to be the dominant discursive strategies utilized by unionist political actors, while ethno-nationalists employ divisive rhetorical strategies in their political communication. In this continuum, polarized political views along with ethnic-based political formations put the issue of identity in a vexed condition and the existing Ethiopian politics in a state of interregnum.

AbstractTranslation of international communications plays an important role in facilitating the spread of a country’s voice and shaping its national image. This study employs multidimensional analysis to analyze China’s interpretation of international communications and compares it with the speeches from the White House press conferences to uncover the register variances between the two. The findings reveal that China and the U.S. differ in 4 dimensions and 46 individual linguistic features. The former is more informational with explicit written features and can be categorized into the register of learned exposition; the latter is more interactive and persuasive with prominent features of colloquialism, belonging to the register of involved persuasion. Through comparison with the source language, we find that the differences between the two are influenced by multiple factors such as source language, interpreting process, and political considerations. In conclusion, the interpretation of China’s international communications is a “third language code” with distinctive features from the language used by the U.S. in the political scenario, reflecting a meticulous, responsible but less interactive national image. These findings could shed light on the interpreting strategies adopted by government interpreters and further improve the effectiveness of international communications.

AbstractThis research examines how Kompas, an Indonesian press company, framed the issues of glasnost and perestroika in its daily publications from 1986 to 1991 to criticise the authoritarian New Order regime. This research found that Kompas attempted to negotiate with the New Order’s centralised authoritarian power through editorial articles on the issues of glasnost and perestroika. Compared to the Old Order Indonesia, the New Order government’s bilateral relations with Russia declined significantly. However, from 1986 to 1991, the frequency of news coverage about Russia (the Soviet Union) was massive. Such frequent coverage was inseparable from the implementation of glasnost and perestroika reform movements in the Soviet Union, which defined the zeitgeist at the time. This research found that Kompas implicitly criticised the New Order regime by articulating that change may occur in an authoritarian and military state, if the government had the determination. Applying a media framing analysis to examine Kompas editorial articles from 1986 to 1991, this research demonstrates that comprehensive media framing strategies are required in exploring issues related to authoritarian political regimes, as the strategies allow the press to express criticism while evading the risk of being banned. Negotiation with existing power holders is necessary so that the media may uphold its role as one of the primary pillars of democracy that is capable of criticising existing power holders.

This paper presents a media-aesthetic framework to study affectivity as a stance. This framework opens up a new perspective on multimodal affective stance-taking in the context of specific media ecologies. It exemplifies this new approach with case studies of the official audiovisual documentation of political debates in the German Bundestag and the Polish Sejm. This new approach addresses the intertwining of audiovisual multimodality with verbo-gestural expressivity (or the multimodality of speaking). Adopting a phenomenological position, we are interested in how the orchestration of the debates as audiovisual events moves the spectators. The concepts ‘Expressive Movement’ and ‘Dynamic Forms of Vitality’ serve as theoretical and methodological references to capture the affective dynamics of audiovisual debates and how these audiovisual images modulate the perceptions and experiences of the spectators. To illustrate and substantiate this approach for linguistic and media analyses of affective stance-taking, the paper outlines basic assumptions and methods. It offers two exemplary case studies from German and Polish parliamentary debates. It is concluded that bringing together media-aesthetic with linguistic analyses of multimodal communication and interaction provides not only a valid starting point for future research of multimodal stance-taking in different media ecologies but also allows researchers to address how and why spectators of audiovisual media performances are moved affectively.

Research on data-driven campaigning has mostly focused on the strategies of central campaign teams. However, there is a lack of evidence explaining how parties and supporters use data-driven campaigning techniques to organise their social media campaigning. Do user engagement metrics influence the choice of campaign themes by encouraging political parties to concentrate their communication on issues that are most liked, commented on, and shared? Our study focuses on the use of Facebook by French political parties and their supporters during the 2022 presidential election campaign. We conducted a supervised content analysis based on machine learning to examine their Facebook posts (n = 17,060). Our results show that the issues prioritized by parties on Facebook may be different from those that are most prominent in their broader communications. In most cases, however, these themes are not chosen based on user engagement, even for parties that claim to have developed their base through digital channels. Instead, the choice of themes seems influenced by more traditional campaign strategies, such as the desire to capture the electorate of their closest rival. In our conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the adoption of data-driven campaigning in digital election communication across Europe.

Election campaigns during the pandemic showcased the increased use of costly digital campaigning by parties. While many studies focus on the use of Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other social networking sites during elections, parties’ use of Google Ads remains widely unstudied. This is surprising given that parties spend a substantial proportion of their budget on Google Ads and Google reports on this spending and other details of the ads in its Transparency Report. Based on the equalisation vs. normalisation thesis, we identify party factors (size, age, government/opposition status, and electoral strongholds) that affect parties’ use of this instrument to a different degree in their campaigns. We aim to highlight parties’ use of Google Ads during the campaigns for the 2021 German Bundestag election, relying on the official data provided via Google’s Ad Library. We discuss both empirical work on the factors that determine the use of Google Ads and conceptual work on the merit and perils of such ads in democratic elections, and we present descriptive and exploratory findings of our deep dive into the archive of Google Ads.

This study examines data-driven campaign (DDC) practices in Sweden. We explore the extent of data-driven practices adopted in Swedish political campaigns, and parties’ motivations to adopt them. Since this is a comparison of domestic parties, we test the importance of four party-level factors—resources, structure, attitudes toward data use, and ideology—using extensive interviews with key campaign managers in Sweden during the 2022 election year. Our results show that the differences among the eight parties studied are rather small, and that systemic factors are more important than party variables to explain the adoption of data-driven approaches. Zooming in on these finer differences we distinguish between top DDC adopters (Social Democrats, Center, and Conservatives) and a lower tier with lower levels of DDC implementation. To explain the differences between the two tiers, we find that economic resources are important, with richer parties being more advanced in DDC use. Party structure, attitudes to data, and ideology do not affect the likelihood of a Swedish party using data analytics in their strategic decision-making. Instead, we suggest party type (catch-all vs. niche) is a potentially more useful party-level factor in explaining variation.

Contemporary political campaigning takes place both online and offline, and can be data-driven. In this piece, we review existing knowledge around data-driven campaigning (DDC) and introduce the new contributions made by the pieces within this thematic issue. We reveal how the studies included in this thematic issue of Media and Communication contribute to this existing knowledge by providing an up-to-date account of how DDC in general, and political microtargeting in specific, have been employed in election campaigns between 2021 and 2023, in a range of countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the US. As a collection, these studies highlight the variance that exists in the degree to which DDC is practiced, the range of DDC tools used, and attitudes toward DDC. In recent election campaigns, DDC takes many forms, and disapproval of DDC varies depending on how it is implemented.

The editorial in "Media Psychology" reflects on the outgoing editors' four-year term, highlighting the journal's achievements and impact. The journal has maintained a high Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore, and Altmetrics, indicating its influence in the fields of communication and applied psychology. The editorial team has focused on open practices, improved representation, and timely peer-review processes, culminating in the selection of a new editorial team to continue the journal's success. [Extracted from the article]

The present study focuses on irony in political communication and ways of expressing it, since in modern political discourse irony is becoming an indispensable characteristic. The ideas are verified on the material of English and American politicians’ speeches. The paper argues that the ironic type of communicative behaviour is realized through an ironic image, a certain temporary role, in compliance with which the speaker builds up his/her remarks. The ironic image functions as an element of the strategy of theatricality, which is typical of political discourse and is aimed at an indirect addressee – the public. Such images rely on the “friend–foe” opposition (also known as: “us vs. them”), which divides the world into those who support “us” and those who oppose “us”. The latter becomes the object of political irony, which is implemented in discourse through various ironic discourse tactics, such as destructiveness, eccentricity, harmonization of communication and others. These tactics are closely connected with the national style of communication and reflect the communicative values of Anglo-Saxon culture: privacy, individualism, common sense, competitiveness, politeness, etc. The hypothesis, stated and verified in the paper, regards ironic images, which in this study are divided into two kinds: those connected with the genre (situational images) and those regulated by the context and the format of speech (emotional images); the latter reflect the mood and feelings at the given moment. The results of the analysis may help to reveal the real politicians’ intentions and preferences and pose challenges for further investigation of political discourse regarding irony and ironic images.

In the USA, for the first time in the 1960s, and in a very systematic manner from 1976 onwards, pre-election debates (televised presidential debates) have become a fundamental and integral method of communication for political parties, as well as an institution of American democracy that contributes significantly to shaping a culture of public political dialogue at a relatively high level, through which citizens accumulate knowledge about political figures and their parties’ positions within a very short period of time before the elections. In Greece, on the contrary, these television programs have not sparked significant interest to date. The subject of this study is the television debates in Greece, evaluated through a brief historical overview and commentary on their structure, culminating in the two televised confrontations that took place within a five-month period during two electoral contests in 2023. Firstly, the reactions to and reception of the two televised debates by citizens on platform X and, secondly, the commentary on the two debates by journalists, columnists, and renowned analysts, reveal the differing interests of both sides. The research results confirm that, in addition to the performance of politicians, citizens are also interested in the conditions and form in which these pre-election televised debates are staged.

Mediatisation has established itself in the last decade as a key approach in media and communication studies. Its aim is to explain the vast transformations of social relations caused by the growing power of the media. I provide a theoretical and empirical critique of this approach, with a particular focus on the institutionalist (strong) approach to mediatisation. As I argue, one of the biggest problems of mediatisation is that it perceives the power of the media in a wholly abstract manner. Even though authors advocating for the mediatisation approach typically preach about holism, their works often narrowly focus on the media, without embedding them in the social totality. This leads to a flawed approach, primarily due to the excessive media-centrism. For a critique of the ontological, epistemological and theoretical failures of mediatisation, I largely base the article on two critical approaches to the media and communication research: critical sociology of the media and political economy of communication. Empirically and mostly for illustrative purposes, the article is based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of Slovenian political parties. Three fundamental issues are identified based on this focus of the paper: mediatisation fails to distinguish between the form and content of communication; it does not make a proper distinction between public political communication and political activity; and it ignores the non-public parts of politics and deep inequalities, which influence the political process. Mediatisation generally bypasses these issues, in turn also ignoring the wider relations of power in capitalist society and how they change.

The hype on generative AI has raised concerns about the spread of disinformation but also opened up new opportunities for hybrid journalism. The proliferation of political propaganda campaigns spread across digital media during election periods constitutes a challenge for journalists who struggle to exercise information gatekeeping. AI-based tools can in principle help, but journalists are resistant to using them since they are sceptical about their compliance with news values and their scarce user-friendliness. To cope with such issues, we present Botlitica, a GPT3-based chatbot able to answer users’ questions according to the information shared on different social media by a given political party which is, thus, embodied by the AI agent in the conversation. The back-end and front-design of the chatbot are devised to privilege transparency. We report the results of a preliminary evaluation of Botlitica which show that the tool fastens journalists’ capabilities to navigate propaganda campaigns inducing them to exercise critical thinking.

This study is situated within the ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the role of social media in the evolving communication landscape. The main aim of this research is to examine the extent to which the Greek traditional media and journalists have adapted to the ethos of social media. In particular, this study conducts a comparative analysis to assess whether the Greek media and journalists have effectively embraced the communication challenges arising from advancements in social media, particularly during election cycles. The theoretical foundation rests on the network theory of power, a concept pioneered by the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells. The empirical component presents the findings obtained through an examination of journalists’ participation in political discourse on Twitter (now named X) throughout seven distinct election periods encompassing all electoral levels in Greece (presidential, national, European and regional/municipal elections, plus a referendum). The findings reveal low levels of adaptation, in contrast with western countries, where journalists and the media have embraced the online culture to a greater extent and appear to take on more prominent roles in debates. The findings provide valuable insights for journalists, politicians and the media in understanding the role of social media in political communication.

Interactivity is among the powerful characteristic that differ social media with another kind of conventional media. Social media can facilitate any kind of communication practice, including political communication. Political communication highly needs the use of media to obtain their objectives, specifically for politician to persuade voters to choose them on election. This study aim to discover the social media strategy used by Indonesia president candidates 2024. Using internet research dan observation, Instagram feeds posts from three candidates’s account were collected and analyzed, during the start of campaign period – November 28TH 2023, until the article was written. Several aspects were assessed, including communication style, consistency, and four levels of political marketing strategy. Result shows that consistency in scheduling, writing caption, and choosing hashtag didn’t directly affect social media engagement, such as like and comment. All President Candidates manage their social media to communicate and persuade their audience or voters, but didn’t utilize the interactivity to reply the comment or build conversation via Instagram feeds. Another findings show that Instagram comment section were dominated by both fans/followers and political buzzers that interactively building conversation. Further research should be done to assess another platform and another type of political marketing content.

Günümüzde kadının siyasal hayattaki rolü, geçmişe oranla artmış olsa da güncel veriler değerlendirildiğinde siyasal katılım oranlarının düşüklüğü dikkat çekmektedir. Kadının siyasal hayattaki rolünü arttırmak ve bu yönde hedeflerin gerçekleştirilmesini sağlamak siyasal hayatın gelişmesi açısından oldukça önemlidir. Propaganda faaliyetleri, geçmişten günümüze değişim ve dönüşüm yaşamışken siyasi partilerin politikaları ve adayların kullanacakları tekniklerin yarattığı etkiler oldukça önemlidir. Propaganda teknikleri, teknolojinin gelişimi ve siyasal iletişimde kullanılan araçlarda yaşanan değişiklikler ile bağlantılı olarak değişmiştir. Geleneksel teknikler ve yeni teknikler üzerine bir analiz yapmak, hangi tekniklerin adaylara daha fazla fayda sağlayacağını ortaya koymak adına önem arz etmektedir. Çalışmanın asıl gayesi, günümüzde siyasal katılımı ve oy oranlarını artırmaya yönelik girişimlerden eski bir teknik olan Canvassing(yüz yüze oy toplama) yönteminin seçmen davranışlarını etkileme sürecinde daha etkili olduğu varsayımından hareketle, seçmenleri oy vermeye ikna yöntemi olarak Canvassing modelini kadınların yönetmesiyle, hedefe ulaşma konusunda sağlayabileceği katkıları ortaya koymaktır. Araştırmada TBMM’nde bulunan partilerin Adana ili sınırları içerisinde yer alan kadın kolları temsilcileri örneklem olarak belirlenmiştir. Partilerin propaganda faaliyetleri ve Canvassing(yüz yüze oy toplama) yönteminden aldıkları geri dönüşler irdelenmiştir. Araştırmada Canvassing(yüz yüze oy toplama) yönteminin yeni tekniklere göre daha etkili sonuçlar doğurduğu ve aynı zamanda kadınların bu tekniği kullanmasıyla beraber oy oranlarında artış yaratarak seçmeni etkileme, ikna etme açısından olumlu katkı sağladığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

Taiwan’s handling of COVID-19 has been seen as a success. Nevertheless, little is known about how the government has considered migrants in its COVID-19 policies. Using a corpus analysis of the legislative speeches of the Taiwanese policymakers between 2020 and 2022, we investigate how migrants are represented in Taiwan’s COVID-19 strategy. Our findings show that policymakers inadequately consider migrants when drawing up emergency measures and restrictions, despite making up of 6.3 per cent of the population. Our findings illustrate that policymakers focus more on migrant workers than migrant spouses and that policymakers demonize migrant workers and victimize migrant spouses. As COVID-19 does not differentiate based on nationality and constituents would want migrants to be represented for their own safety, the study demonstrates how policymakers may accommodate a diverse population beyond their constituents in crises and illuminates ways to create an inclusive society where non-citizens’ health and safety are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the representation of scientists and politicians in editorial cartoons from three countries: Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Of 466 cartoons collected from six Sunday newspapers (two from each country) over an 18-month period, 226 (49%) contained some reference to COVID-19. A qualitative analysis of cartoons highlights the politicisation of science and the relative absence of scientists in the cartoon discourse. Cartoonists focus on the political aspects of the pandemic, often portraying politicians as juggling competing demands, such as health needs versus personal freedom. However, they often miss the opportunity to address the reasons for the imposition of COVID-19-related restrictions or the effectiveness of health measures, instead portraying scientists as oppositional figures. In addressing COVID-19 in this way, cartoonists subtly suggest conflicts between the values of scientists, politicians and society. Cartoonists also tie the pandemic into broader political discourses in each country, for example, states' rights, corruption and Brexit in, respectively Australia, South Africa and the UK. This work provides insights into journalistic coverage of complex, science-related issues, with a particular focus on the ways that editorial coverage reflects public sentiment, policy responses and social attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual political communication in the social media sphere is increasingly valuable for its ability to more effectively persuade viewers in this increasingly cluttered media landscape. Using multi-model discourse analysis and following the theoretical framework of Everyday Politics, this study focuses on a random sample (N = 200) of user-generated Internet memes from Chinese national youth propaganda campaign Youth Study. In addition, the author observed the sharing and dissemination of these memes in online public discussions. The findings reveal that young participants maintain a varying distance from politics. They employ strategies such as dark humor, hyperbole, contrast, and appropriation of pop culture to portray two key roles – the charming, brilliant followers and the abandoned, hunted breakers, and to construct four main scenarios-cute threat, humble beg, funny politics, and veiled resistance. This politicized propaganda campaign is being transformed from state aspirations to the creative daily cultural consumption of young netizens. This analysis contributes to the scholarly literature on youth subcultures, political mobilization, and visual propaganda in post-socialist China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]