Full Description
This updated and expanded second edition brings together cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of political uses of social media.
In its 32 chapters, this second edition of the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics covers the good, the bad, and the as yet uncertain of current developments in the uses of social media in political contexts, ten years on from the first book. It is organised in six sections: Concepts, Challenges, Policies, Problems, Platforms, and Possibilities, each featuring chapters by leading researchers in the field that address these themes from a wide variety of viewpoints. This edition arrives at a new critical point: generative AI and other emerging technologies may either accelerate the crises of disinformation, polarisation, and democratic decline, or open new spaces for civic innovation, regulation, and accountability. The politics of digital platforms remain unsettled, and this Companion provides a critical map of the present while pointing to the possibilities and futures that will define the next decade of social media and politics.
At a time when the politics of social media use remain unsettled, this comprehensive collection is an essential reference for academic communities in areas ranging from media and communication studies through internet studies and journalism studies to political science, and may be used by researchers as well as teachers and students in these respective fields.
Chapters 3, 15 and 26 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 International license.
Contents
Introduction Part I: Concepts 1. Great Expectations: Network Media Logic and Politics in the Age of Generative AI 2. A Perfect Match? The Populism-Social Media Nexus 3. Digital Dimensions of Propaganda: Technological, Doctrinal, and Organizational Shifts in Authoritarian Strategic Communication 4. Deliberation and Destructive Polarisation in Social Media Part II: Challenges 5. Studying Social Media and Politics: What Is 'Social' about Our Research? 6. Can African Feminist Philosophy Inform a Holistic Multilateral Approach to Governing Social Media? 7. The Global Village Is Here, Just Not Like We Expected: Transnationalism on Social Media and the Rise of Networked Cosmopolitanism 8. Alt-Platformisation: Evolution of Fringe Communication and Political Discourses Through and with the Web 9. Hyperconnectivity, Not Isolation: Why Concerns about 'Echo Chambers' and 'Filter Bubbles' Address the Wrong Problem 10. Authenticity in the Age of AI: Beyond the Alarmist Deepfake Discourse Part III: Policies 11. The Truthkeeping Moment: The Rise and Fall of Platform-Supported Fact-Checking 12. Public Speech, Private Governance, Public Values? Platform Policies on Political Advertising 13. Who Do Parties Target? Worldwide Evidence on Political Microtargeting 14. Social Media Data Access in the Post-API Age 15. Computational Infrastructures for the Collection and Study of Digital Platform-Based Political Advertising 16. When Private Affords Public: Politics on Platforms or Platforms for Politics? Part IV: Problems 17. Restating the State? Social Media Propaganda and the State-Non-State Nexus 18. The Influencer Theater: Participatory Disinformation in the Influencer Era 19. Navigating Coordination and Inauthentic Behaviour: Challenges and Innovations in Social Media Detection 20. Populism across Two Continents: Assessing the Use of Populist Communication Styles on Facebook across 10 Countries 21. Harmful Visual Humour on Far-Right Social Media: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Reactionary Memes Part V: Platforms 22. So Long Twitter, and Thanks for All the Tweets 23. Digital Public Opinion in China: Weibo Discourses from COVID-19 and Beyond 24. Instagram and Politics: A Systematic Literature Review 25. Locating WhatsApp in Indian Politics: History, Media Ecology, and Ideology 26. Telegram as a Developing Political Actor: Conceptualising Platform Actorness 27. Play, Protest, Repeat: Conceptualizing Playful Activism on TikTok 28. Memetic Politics on TikTok: Key Ideas, Considerations, and a Tanghulu Case Study Part VI: Possibilities 29. Busting the Myth of 'Leaderless' Movements: Crowd-Enabled Elites in Digitally Networked Activism 30. Digital Resistance under Authoritarianism: A Comparative Study of Activist Publics across Five Countries 31. Participatory War and Social Media: Discursive, Material, and Ethical Dimensions 32. Who Wins the Engagement Race? Examining Normalization and Equalization Theories across 12 Ibero-American Countries
