Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2018

In recent years, the connection between online and in particular social media and politics has become one of the central ones in contemporary societies, and has been explored very widely in political research and media and communication studies. Against such growing body of research, this Special Issue foregrounds the role of language as a key carrier of political ideologies and practices on social and online media. It aims to advance the scholarly understanding of contemporary political and democratic dynamics by postulating the need for a broader, problem-driven look at how political practices and ideologies are articulated on social and online media. It illustrates the value of a cross-disciplinary take that allows overcoming both the classic (e.g. qualitative vs. quantitative) and the more recent (e.g. small vs. big data) divides in explorations of the language of online and politics.

This article analyses the impact of “super-participants” – people who create lots of content, set the agenda, or moderate debates – on everyday online political talk in a non-political online discussion forum – or “third space”. The article finds that there was extensive evidence of super-participation in the forum, and that they did impact the nature of political talk.

This study investigates, over an 18-month period surrounding the 2016 Brexit referendum, the commenting activity of nearly 2 million Facebook users engaging with political news from British media or with the posts of referendum campaigns. We ask whether citizens’ engagement with political news on Facebook motivates their participation with political campaign posts, and we examine whether users commenting on campaign pages trend towards ideologically reinforcing media. Overall, we find comparatively low levels of commenting activity on the official referendum campaigns vis-à-vis the media, and the majority of users (70%) commented only once. Looking at the subset of users commenting on both page types (“cross-posters”), we identify a general spillover effect from media to campaign pages, suggesting a positive correlation between political interest and online participation on Facebook. Reverse spillover occurs immediately around and after the vote, with Remain cross-posters active on the Guardian while Leave cross-posters’ media engagement registers as more diffuse.

We analyzed Twitter language to explore hypotheses derived from moral foundations theory, which suggests that liberals and conservatives prioritize different values. In Study 1 , we captured 11 million tweets from nearly 25,000 U.S. residents and observed that liberals expressed fairness concerns more often than conservatives, whereas conservatives were more likely to express concerns about group loyalty, authority, and purity. Increasing political sophistication exacerbated ideological differences in authority and group loyalty. At low levels of sophistication, liberals used more harm language, but at high levels of sophistication conservatives referenced harm more often. In Study 2 , we analyzed 59,000 tweets from 388 members of the U.S. Congress. Liberal legislators used more fairness- and harm-related words, whereas conservative legislators used more authority-related words. Unexpectedly, liberal legislators used more language pertaining to group loyalty and purity. Follow-up analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives in Congress use similar words to emphasize different policy priorities.

The production of political talk is changing in response to ongoing changes in the overall media ecology. The rise of web TV challenges the previously dominant mediated politics of traditional broadcasting. In this paper we examine the practices of the mediatization of politics in the web TV environment via a humorous encounter between a self-declared “prankster” posing as a web TV broadcaster, and several Swedish politicians. The discussion reflects on various data emanating from this encounter to reveal how Web TV challenges traditional broadcasting norms, and offers fresh challenges for politicians who are continuously adapting to new media logics for exposure.

Does the interaction with the opinions of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ affect the behavior of politicians? So far, little attention has been devoted to the effect of social networking sites (SNS) on ‘hard politics’ choices. Focusing on two case studies related to Italian politics, namely the debate on the civil unions bill and the ‘Fertility Day’ crisis, in 2016, this paper tries to fill this gap assessing the influence of SNS on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, supervised aggregated sentiment analysis and time series analysis are used to evaluate whether politicians surrender to the pressure put on them by their followers. The findings highlight some positive effects in terms of accountability/transparency, though in terms of responsiveness politics seems to continue as usual, and the road toward a full ‘sentiment democracy’ is still far ahead.

How successful is the Islamic State’s online strategy? To what extent does the organization achieve its goals of attracting a global audience, broadcasting its military successes, and marketing the Caliphate? Using Twitter and YouTube search data, collected throughout 2015 and early 2016, we assess how suspected ISIS accounts, sympathizers, and opponents behave across two social media platforms, offering key insights into the successes and limitations of ISIS’s information warfare strategy. Analyzing the tweet content and metadata from 16,364 suspected ISIS accounts, we find that a core network of ISIS Twitter users are producing linguistically diverse narratives, touting battlefield victories and depicting utopian life in the Caliphate. Furthermore, a dataset of over 70 million tweets, as well as analysis YouTube search data, indicates that although pro-ISIS content spreads globally and remains on message, it is far less prolific than anti-ISIS content. However, this anti-ISIS content is not necessarily anti-extremist or aligned with Western policy goals.

This paper looks at how social/online media – using the example of Twitter – are used in the politico-organizational communication of the European Union at a time when it faces multiple crises and is in acute need of effectively communicating its politics to the European demos. Proposing a critical discourse framework for the analysis of the politico-organizational use of Twitter, the paper shows that while, to some extent, bringing change or ‘modernization’ to EU political communication patterns, social/online media help in sustaining some of the deep-seated dispositions in EU communicative and organizational practices as well as political discourses. As deployed by the EU’s – and specifically the European Commission’s – spokesperson service, social/online help in solidifying some of the controversial patterns in EU political communication. They also bring in other, more contemporary, challenges as regards using Twitter and social media as parts of political and institutional/organizational communication.

As the Internet has come to play a greater role in politics, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how digital and social media are changing politics. The competition between the innovation and normalization hypotheses has been at the center of the debate. This article sets out to identify evidence of innovation and normalization in terms of how politicians communicate in- and the level of influence they are attaining within the political blogosphere. The analyses conducted show paradoxical results as we find that those groups of politicians who are utilizing political communication in the blogosphere in more innovative and progressive ways – mirroring the hopes and expectations about how social media might influence politicians and political communication – have weaker positions within the blog network compared to other politicians.

Negative campaigning emphasizes what is wrong with an opponent, in terms of policy or personality. American research shows that negative campaigning online has become entrenched. The objective of this paper is to provide an empirical account of the amount and condition of negative messages produced on Twitter by Canadian party leaders. The data comes from a content analysis of tweets in two elections held in 2011. This paper has two research questions: first, what is the tone of Twitter communication? Is there differential use of Twitter by incumbents and challengers in terms of tone? Despite expectations, the data shows Canadian party leaders infrequently attack opponents on Twitter; less than 10% of tweets are negative. This said, we do find evidence that challengers are more likely than incumbents to go negative on Twitter. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this finding for future research on online negativity.