Social Media and Politics Folgen

Dr. Dan Lane, Assistant Professor of Communication at UC Santa Barbara, guests to discuss his research on how political self-expression influences citizens' perceptions of their political selves as citizens. We also talk about how certain design features of social media seem to affect youth political expression, and how different acts of self-expression can influence political self concepts to varying degrees. Here are the three studies we discussed in the episode: Social Media Expression and the Political Self Civic Laboratories: Youth Political Expression in Anonymous, Ephemeral, Geo-Bounded Social Media Social Media Design for Youth Political Expression: Testing the Roles of Identifiability and Geo-boundedness

Dr. Sebastian Valenzuela, Associate Professor of Communication at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, guests to discuss two studies on how social media impact political participation.The first study demonstrates how both Facebook and Twitter contribute to protest participation, but they do so through different pathways that relate to strong and weak tie social networks.The second study is a meta-analysis of existing research, and it explores whether exposure to cross-cutting information affects political participation. Both studies are published in Political Communication, and you can read them here:1) Ties, Likes, and Tweets: Using Strong and Weak Ties to Explain Differences in Protest Participation Across Facebook and Twitter Use2) A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Cross-Cutting Exposure on Political Participation

Chris Dick, Director of Applied Data Science at Civis Analytics, guests to discuss how data science approaches are being used to increase participation in the 2020 US Census.We talk about some of the political and financial challenges facing the census, what types of data are being used models of hard-to-count communities, and how different types of messaging can either increase or decrease Census response rates.Learn more about the Civis Census Intelligence Center here!