Following the 2017 UK general election, there was much debate about the so-called ‘youthquake’, or increase in youth turnout (YouGov). Some journalists claimed it was the ‘. . . memes wot won it’. This article seeks to understand the role of memes during political campaigns. Combining meta-data and content analysis, this article aims to answer three questions. First, who creates political memes? Second, what is the level of engagement with political memes and who engages with them? Finally, can any meaningful political information be derived from memes? The findings here suggest that by far the most common producers of memes were citizens suggesting that memes may be a form of citizen-initiated political participation. There was a high level of engagement with memes with almost half a million shares in our sample. However, the level of policy information in memes was low suggesting they are unlikely to increase political knowledge.
Ti t l e 'H ello, w o rl d' : GC HQ, Twit t e r a n d s o ci al m e di a e n g a g e m e n t A u t h o r s M cLo u g hli n, LDG, Wa r d, SJ a n d Lo m a s , DWB
This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on content
moderation by focusing on its practice in relation to localized social media contexts, an
area which remains under-researched. It makes two key contributions. Firstly, it presents
the results of a study on moderation practices in relation to place-named Facebook groups
across Greater London. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrators and moderators
from 16 Facebook groups, we focus on exploring how such administrators and moderators
negotiate an apparent ‘orientational’ tension between ‘translocality’ and ‘locality’. On the
one hand, we explore how administrators and moderators oriented partly to what might be
understood as the 'translocal' space of Facebook as a platform. On the other hand, we also
sought to understand how such administrators and moderators orient to the localised
situation surrounding the place-named Facebook group. Our second key contribution aligns
with the conference theme on co-dependence and social media, outlining a conceptual approach
for researching the geographical contexts or ‘place’ of content moderation more broadly. We
emphasize the inherent, practical locality of content moderation. Drawing on a long
tradition of relational approaches in human geography, cultural anthropology and philosophy,
we conceptualize ‘locality’ as something produced through practical action, rather being
pre-given, specific geographical locations. Approaching the place or context of content
moderation relationally, rather than via geographical scales such as local or global, might
not only provide a more context sensitive approach, but also, underline the limits of
large-scale moderation, whether by platforms or governments, or through human or algorithmic
interventions.
This paper examines the structure of Twitter communication networks between MPs during the 2016 EU Referendum campaign. In particular, the research examines the impact of Twitter in two dimensions: (1) how far social media might facilitate inter-party linkages thus eroding traditional partisan relations between MPs? This was given added potential by the supposedly cross-party nature of the Referendum campaign and, therefore, we specifically examined the collective communicative networks that formed around Leave and Remain amongst MPs; (2) Given the potential of social media to provide a platform for individual politicians to personalize campaigns, we asked how far social media might disrupt traditional formal intra-party hierarchies? Did, for example, backbench or relatively unknown figures come to the fore in the EU debate? Our results indicate that whilst there existed a high degree of partisanship, interestingly, Remainer MPs tended to adhere to party networks resulting in a divided remain network. By contrast, the Leave network was more unified but also more porous. Within the networks themselves, the centrality of individual MPs did not always reflect their formal status.
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