Elections and Social Networks around the World

Elections and Social Networks around the World
Author: Erica Guevara
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040185940

This book analyzes the role of social networks during electoral campaigns around the world, taking into account the non‐technological particularities (political, electoral, social, economic, cultural) of the media configurations of different countries. Political parties all over the world engage in real virtual battles to appear at the cutting edge of technology. Providing in‐depth case studies from across Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, this book emphasizes the need to study how institutions, culture, and politics shape the processes of technology diffusion in each context. It asks: what are the uses of social networks in election campaigns in different countries? and what are the factors that lead to social networks playing an important role in the elections of a given country? International and comparative in focus, this book brings together work on the uses of social networks (Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, and more) in the context of an election campaign by different actors (such as parties, companies, journalists, and voters). This book explores the different methodological and theoretical approaches developed for the study of the uses of social networks in an electoral context. The contributors focus on the identification of the “online ecosystem” of electoral actors in each country, studying their strategies and logic. They also analyze the scaremongering rhetoric about the possible effect of social media on elections as an object of study. While taking seriously the issues of polarization, disinformation, or negative campaigning, this book provides understanding of how these work and how their discourses are constructed. This book will be of great interest to upper‐level students and scholars of Political Science, Media, and Communications Studies.

Twitter and Elections around the World

Twitter and Elections around the World
Author: Richard Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317363132

Twitter already has become an important electoral communication tool between candidates, parties and their specific constituencies. No serious candidate campaign ignores Twitter, while political party organizations utilize Twitter to communicate with partisans, reinforce supporters, and mobilize voters. Whereas much scholarship to date has focused primarily on Twitter’s political usage in the United States, there still remain many questions about the political uses and effects of Twitter in a global context. Does Twitter effect how reporters interact with candidates or even with each other? Does Twitter increase voter participation? Who is tweeting about elections? Why do people use Twitter in electoral contexts? Which type of candidate is more likely to use Twitter and why? Do parties differ in their use of Twitter, and why? Does Twitter increase candidate-voter interaction? Is Twitter shaping elections in various system contexts, and if so how? What is the influence of system context on Twitter use by parties, candidates, reporters, and voters? Eloquently combining theory and practice, established and rising scholars in the field of political communication have been brought together to provide an essential overview of the influence of Twitter on elections in a comparative perspective. Readers of this book will not only learn everything there is to know about this specific influence of Twitter, but more broadly how to approach the study of various online tools in general.

Social Media and Democracy

Social Media and Democracy
Author: Nathaniel Persily
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108835554

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

The Hype Machine

The Hype Machine
Author: Sinan Aral
Publisher: Currency
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0525574522

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

Socially Elected

Socially Elected
Author: Craig Agranoff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2011-10
Genre: Advertising, Political
ISBN: 9780578092164

The use of social media and political purposes isn't entirely new. Many argue that Thomas Paine's political tract, Common Sense, was an early example of social media in action, galvanizing people in town halls and taverns. Today, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are being used to organize movements and amass volunteers for various campaigns at local and national levels. Facebook alone has more than 700 million active users worldwide, and surpasses even Google in page views. At the heart of the social revolution in politics today is the scale and accessibility of the technology that under-girds it. Different from the past, political campaigns, both local and national, can now propel candidates into office by banking on social media's vast infrastructure. So what part does social media play in your campaign? Do you know what's needed to win in today's election scene? Are you willing to adapt? In this book you will learn: How to use social media step-by-step to launch winning campaigns * Why social media matters * Must have social media platforms for electoral success, and * How not to ruin your campaign - The rules to winning elections have officially changed. As a candidate or campaign organizer you can either choose to embrace the new rules surrounding the ballot box or simply plan defeat. Social media is now the game changer. It's this easy to understand, your campaign can either stay ahead of the curve utilizing social tools or fall way behind it, the choice is yours.

Advances In Pattern Recognition And Artificial Intelligence

Advances In Pattern Recognition And Artificial Intelligence
Author: Marleah Blom
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9811239029

This book includes reviewed papers by international scholars from the 2020 International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (held online). The papers have been expanded to provide more details specifically for the book. It is geared to promote ongoing interest and understanding about pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Like the previous book in the series, this book covers a range of topics and illustrates potential areas where pattern recognition and artificial intelligence can be applied. It highlights, for example, how pattern recognition and artificial intelligence can be used to classify, predict, detect and help promote further discoveries related to credit scores, criminal news, national elections, license plates, gender, personality characteristics, health, and more.Chapters include works centred on medical and financial applications as well as topics related to handwriting analysis and text processing, internet security, image analysis, database creation, neural networks and deep learning. While the book is geared to promote interest from the general public, it may also be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the field.

Computational Propaganda

Computational Propaganda
Author: Samuel C. Woolley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 019093140X

Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks

The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks
Author: Jennifer Nicoll Victor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1011
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190228210

Politics is intuitively about relationships, but until recently the network perspective has not been a dominant part of the methodological paradigm that political scientists use to study politics. This volume is a foundational statement about networks in the study of politics.

Communicator-in-Chief

Communicator-in-Chief
Author: John Allen Hendricks
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2010-01-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0739141074

Communicator-in-Chief: How Barack Obama Used New Media Technology to Win the White House examines the fascinating and precedent-setting role new media technologies and the Internet played in the 2008 presidential campaign that allowed for the historic election of the nation's first African American president. It was the first presidential campaign in which the Internet, the electorate, and political campaign strategies for the White House successfully converged to propel a candidate to the highest elected office in the nation. The contributors to this volume masterfully demonstrate how the Internet is to President Barack Obama what television was to President John Kennedy, thus making Obama a truly twenty-first century communicator and politician. Furthermore, Communicator-in-Chief argues that Obama's 2008 campaign strategies established a model that all future campaigns must follow to achieve any measure of success. The Barack Obama campaign team astutely discovered how to communicate and motivate not only the general electorate but also the technology-addicted Millennial Generation - a generational voting block that will be a juggernaut in future elections.

When the Press Fails

When the Press Fails
Author: W. Lance Bennett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226042863

A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, When the Press Fails argues the dependence of reporters on official sources disastrously thwarts coverage of dissenting voices from outside the Beltway. The result is both an indictment of official spin and an urgent call to action that questions why the mainstream press failed to challenge the Bush administration’s arguments for an invasion of Iraq or to illuminate administration policies underlying the Abu Ghraib controversy. Drawing on revealing interviews with Washington insiders and analysis of content from major news outlets, the authors illustrate the media’s unilateral surrender to White House spin whenever oppositional voices elsewhere in government fall silent. Contrasting these grave failures with the refreshingly critical reporting on Hurricane Katrina—a rare event that caught officials off guard, enabling journalists to enter a no-spin zone—When the Press Fails concludes by proposing new practices to reduce reporters’ dependence on power. “The hand-in-glove relationship of the U.S. media with the White House is mercilessly exposed in this determined and disheartening study that repeatedly reveals how the press has toed the official line at those moments when its independence was most needed.”—George Pendle, Financial Times “Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston are indisputably right about the news media’s dereliction in covering the administration’s campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq.”—Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune “[This] analysis of the weaknesses of Washington journalism deserves close attention.”—Russell Baker, New York Review of Books