Yesterday I spoke to Sebastian Seibt from France 24 about the role of social media in the riots seen in English towns and cities over the past week.
We discussed the role of public figures, journalists and influencers in amplifying misinformation that contributed to the violence. I suggested that it was too early to tell whether Russian disinformation agents had played a key role in the spread of false information about the Southport attacker.
In this piece, I analyse the role of social media misinformation in the Southport riots earlier this week. I explore how online platforms circulated false information alleging the attacker was Muslim, a migrant and a refugee.
I argue that while social media helped amplify tensions, their role should not be overblown. Politicians must also take some responsibility for their role in creating a toxic discourse surrounding immigration.
Many thanks to Avery Anapol for the invitation to write this piece.
I have an article in a new publication on the 2024 UK General Election edited by Dan Jackson, Julie Firestone, Emily Harmer, Einar Thorsen, Darren Lilleker, Katy Parry and Scott Wright. This rapid response report features 101 contributions from 130 UK and international academics .
Many thanks to the editors for the invitation to participate and all their hard work in producing this comprehensive report.
My article explores the Facebook ads paid for by the parties in Northern Ireland. I analyse who spent the most, who were the most prominent politicians, and the rhetoric deployed in these ads.
Yesterday I was interviewed by Alys Davies for a BBC News article on the All Eyes on Rafah image that has been heavily shared on Instagram over the past few days. I argued that the AI-generated image went ‘viral’ due to the fact it did not show graphic images of the victims of the Israeli attack, and its amplification by celebrities. However, activists and journalists on the ground might feel aggrieved at this ‘sanitised’ version of the attacks that left 45 dead and many more injured. Thanks to Alys for the invitation to speak about this issue.
Delighted to be involved in organising this great workshop on researching social media research. Please do share widely and submit!
Researching Social Media After the API: A One-Day Workshop
University of Liverpool (and online)
Wednesday 19th June 2024 (exact times to be confirmed!)
Deadline for submission: Friday 24th May 2024
In the recent past, social media platforms became more open about working alongside academic researchers and crucially, enabling academic access to their data in order to facilitate political communication research (and many other forms of research besides). However, this has been dramatically reversed in recent years in what Axel Bruns (2019) has referred to as the “APIcalyspe”. Both Meta and X (formerly Twitter) have withdrawn or sought to restrict access to their platforms for academic research by making it prohibitively expensive. The discipline now stands at a crossroads (Bruns, 2019). Either accept and adapt to the new access arrangements, most likely to the detriment of the scope, volume, and overall quality of the research, or consider methodological innovations and workarounds to examine these platforms central to our everyday existence. To this end, we would like to invite contributions to a one-day workshop to be held in hybrid format (online and in person, at the University of Liverpool), to discuss how we might continue to research social media platforms under these difficult conditions.
Potential topics could include (but are not restricted to):
– researching the ‘black box’ (documenting and analysing communication on closed platforms such as WhatsApp/Discord/ etc.
– The significance of small-N case studies
– Researching dead or declining platforms
– The ethics of collaborating with technology companies
– Researching content moderation practices
– Practical reflections on specific methods
– Qualitative approaches
Please submit a 300 word abstract outlining the topic of your proposed contribution along with your name and contact information. Please also indicate if you would prefer to contribute online or in person. Abstracts addressing political research topics (broadly defined) will be prioritized. Abstracts and queries should be sent to Emily Harmer: E.Harmer@liverpool.ac.ukby 24th May 2024.
The workshop is funded by DigiPol: Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy at the University of Liverpool. We have a small pot of money to assist with travel costs to attend in person. Priority will be given to PGRs or unwaged/precariously employed colleagues. If you would like to be considered for a travel bursary, please indicate this in your submission so we can assess demand.
Organisers: James Dennis (University of Portsmouth), Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool), Liam McLoughlin (University of Liverpool), Paul Reilly (University of Glasgow) and Ros Southern (University of Liverpool).
I have a new article published in the Conversation UK. In this piece, I argue that the removal of guardrails and safety measures from online platforms makes it harder to promote reconciliation in deeply-divided societies. Drawing on examples such as my own work on Northern Ireland, I suggest that commercial platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) are not the best place to promote peace. Perhaps a public service internet would be a more suitable forum in which to reconcile former antagonists.
Many thanks to Charlotte Morris, Dale Berning Saw and the Conversation UK for their feedback and assistance in getting this published.
Delighted to be involved in organising this great workshop on researching social media research. Please do share widely and submit!
Researching Social Media After the API: A One-Day Workshop
University of Liverpool (and online)
Wednesday 19th June 2024 (exact times to be confirmed!)
Deadline for submission: Friday 24th May 2024
In the recent past, social media platforms became more open about working alongside academic researchers and crucially, enabling academic access to their data in order to facilitate political communication research (and many other forms of research besides). However, this has been dramatically reversed in recent years in what Axel Bruns (2019) has referred to as the “APIcalyspe”. Both Meta and X (formerly Twitter) have withdrawn or sought to restrict access to their platforms for academic research by making it prohibitively expensive. The discipline now stands at a crossroads (Bruns, 2019). Either accept and adapt to the new access arrangements, most likely to the detriment of the scope, volume, and overall quality of the research, or consider methodological innovations and workarounds to examine these platforms central to our everyday existence. To this end, we would like to invite contributions to a one-day workshop to be held in hybrid format (online and in person, at the University of Liverpool), to discuss how we might continue to research social media platforms under these difficult conditions.
Potential topics could include (but are not restricted to):
– researching the ‘black box’ (documenting and analysing communication on closed platforms such as WhatsApp/Discord/ etc.
– The significance of small-N case studies
– Researching dead or declining platforms
– The ethics of collaborating with technology companies
– Researching content moderation practices
– Practical reflections on specific methods
– Qualitative approaches
Please submit a 300 word abstract outlining the topic of your proposed contribution along with your name and contact information. Please also indicate if you would prefer to contribute online or in person. Abstracts addressing political research topics (broadly defined) will be prioritized. Abstracts and queries should be sent to Emily Harmer: E.Harmer@liverpool.ac.ukby 24th May 2024.
The workshop is funded by DigiPol: Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy at the University of Liverpool. We have a small pot of money to assist with travel costs to attend in person. Priority will be given to PGRs or unwaged/precariously employed colleagues. If you would like to be considered for a travel bursary, please indicate this in your submission so we can assess demand.
Organisers: James Dennis (University of Portsmouth), Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool), Liam McLoughlin (University of Liverpool), Paul Reilly (University of Glasgow) and Ros Southern (University of Liverpool).
Digital Contention in a Divided Society, Manchester University Press 2024.
This month the paperback version of Digital Contention in a Divided Society (featuring a new afterword) is published. It can be ordered on the Manchester University Press website here.
I will be having three book launch events in England, Scotland and Germany over the next three weeks. Details of each are below.
Leicester
I am delighted to be back in Leicester for a book talk on 24 April, hosted by John Coster (Documentary Media Centre). There is no need to register for this free event. Details are below.
Venue:237 Advanced Research Centre (ARC), University of Glasgow, 11 Chapel Lane, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
Join Paul Reilly (University of Glasgow) and host, Dave Scott (Nil by Mouth), to celebrate the paperback launch of Paul’s book, Digital contention in a divided society: Social media, parades and protests in Northern Ireland.
They will discuss the role of social media in protests and civil unrest in Northern Ireland, followed by a Q&A session. There will be a drinks reception afterwards.
With thanks to Dr. Giuliana Source, I will be delivering a lunchtime talk at the Institut für Medienwissenschaft at Tübingen University. Details on the talk can be found here.
I have a new article out in Information, Communication & Society this week. Entitled ‘Random access memories or clichéd representations? Exploring historical photographs of the troubles on Instagram’, it explores 100 historical photographs of the Troubles on Instagram.
.The abstract can be read below:
Social media provide unprecedented opportunities for the distribution of photographs capturing experiences of conflict. Instagram in particular renders conflict photography searchable, whilst also aggregating the memories of traumatised communities. This paper adds to the nascent literature in this area by exploring how the photosharing app is used to share photographs of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, a low-intensity conflict that resulted in 3,600 fatalities and left many more bereaved, injured and traumatised. Two decades on from the Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society in which competing narratives over the conflict remain deeply entrenched. This study explored photographic representation of the Troubles, with a specific focus on who was represented in these images and whether they were evoke personal memories of the conflict. A content and narrative analysis of 100 historical images tagged #thetroubles was conducted in order to explore these issues. Results indicate that images showing the ‘peculiarity’ of everyday life during the conflict, such as armed British soldiers standing in close quarters to children playing in the street, were the most prominent visual representations under this hashtag. The memories evoked by such historical photographs reinforce zero-sum narratives on conflict, rather than promote new interpretations that build support for peace in ‘post-conflict’ societies.
The article is published Open Access and can be found here
Many thanks to the editors and reviewers for their help in getting this out. I would like to express my gratitude to Ekatherina Zhukova and Marguerite Borelli for their comments and input on earlier versions of this paper.
Please join the authors for a book launch event to mark the publication of the book ‘Deconstructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization’. This will be held online on 16 April (9-10:30am GMT).
This book explores how both elite and non-elite actors frame societal threats such as the refugee crisis and COVID-19 using both digital and traditional media. It also explores ways in which the framing of these issues as threatening can be challenged using these platforms.
People typically experience societal threats such as war and terrorism through the media they consume, both on and offline. Much of the research in this area to date focuses on either how political and media elites present these issues to citizens, or audience responses to these frames. This book takes a different approach by focusing on how issues such as the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are both constructed and deconstructed in an era of hybrid media. It draws on a range of traditional and innovative research methodologies to explore how these issues are framed as ‘threats’ within deeply mediatized societies, ranging from content analysis of newspaper coverage of the Macedonian name dispute in Greece to investigating conspiratorial communities on YouTube using Systemic Functional Linguistics. In doing so, this book enriches our understanding of not only how civil and uncivil actors frame these issues, but also their impact on societal resilience towards future crises.
(De)constructing Societal Threats During Times of Deep Mediatization will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Communication Studies, Media Studies, Journalism, Cultural Studies, Research Methods, Sociology and Politics.
The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Communication Review.
Many thanks to our authors for their excellent contributions, which are listed below:
1. Framing the Macedonian name dispute in Greece: Nationalistic journalism and the existential threat
Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis
2. The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality
Zhe Xu and Mengrong Zhang
3. A systemic functional linguistics approach to analysing white supremacist and conspiratorial Ddscourse on YouTube
Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna
4. Internet regulation and crisis-related resilience: From Covid-19 to existential risks
Gregory Asmolov
The book can be ordered here and you can register for the online book launch here
Dr Paul Reilly 
