Journal of Digital Social Research

Special Issue on Methods in Visual Politics and Protest

Suay Melisa Özkula — 2024-03-06

This special issue draws together five articles in the arena of methods in visual politics and protest. It addresses three core methodological challenges across the research process (data access, collection, analysis, visualisation: the proliferation of visually oriented platforms, the emergence of novel visual practices, and the increasing application of digital methods. Their key contributions lie in the development of mixed visual methods approaches, new techniques for constructing and curating visual datasets, and methodological explorations of visual anti-publics.

Analyzing Radical Visuals at Scale

Julian Hohner — 2024-03-06

Research examining radical visual communication and its manifestation on the trending platform TikTok is limited. This paper presents a novel methodological framework for studying mobilization strategies of far-right groups on TikTok, employing a mixed-method approach that combines manual annotation, unsupervised image classification, and named-entity recognition to analyze the dynamics of radical visuals at scale. Differentiating between internal and external mobilization, we use popularity and engagement cues to investigate far-right mobilization efforts on TikTok within and outside their community. Our findings shed light on the effectiveness of unsupervised image classification when utilized within a broader mixed-method framework, as each observed far-right group employs unique platform characteristics. While Conspiracists flourish in terms of overall popularity and internal mobilization, nationalist and protest content succeeds by using a variety of persuasive visual content to attract and engage external audiences. The study contributes to existing literature by bridging the gap between visual political communication at scale and radicalization research. By offering insights into mobilization strategies of far-right groups, our study provides a foundation for policymakers, researchers, and online platforms to develop proactive measures to address the risks associated with the dissemination of extremist ideologies on social media.

The contingent macro

Giulia Giorgi — 2024-03-06

This paper investigates how internet memes are complex and stratified objects, going beyond the standardized definition of ‘image macro’ habitually employed by scholars. To this end, we take the 2019 Italian government crisis as a case study and analyze a dataset of related 1.269 memes using a combination of computational and qualitative methodologies. Our analysis shows the emergence, proliferation, and fading of popular templates, which remix images and text from the political crisis and occasionally serve as frames for other events: the Contingent Macro. Together with less standardized memetic instances, we found that Contingent Macros concur to create metaphoric narratives, which develop as the event unfolds. Besides formalizing the concept of Contingent Macro, this work provides scholars with a methodological toolkit for the analysis of event-related meme production, which can capture the fluidity of memes. Overall, the article concurs to underline the need for a clear, context-specific definition of memes, tailored to specific social, cultural, and research contexts.

Quali-quanti visual methods and political bots

Janna Joceli Omena — 2024-03-06

Computational social science research on automated social media accounts, colloquially dubbed “bots”, has tended to rely on binary verification methods to detect bot operations on social media. Typically focused on textual data from Twitter (now rebranded as "X"), these inference-based methods are prone to finding false positives and failing to understand the subtler ways in which bots operate over time, through visual content and in particular contexts. This research brings methodological contributions to such studies, focusing on what it calls “bolsobots” in Brazilian social media. Named after former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the bolsobots refer to the extensive and skilful usage of partial or fully automated accounts by marketing teams, hackers, activists or campaign supporters. These accounts leverage online political culture to sway public opinion for or against public policies, opposition figures, or Bolsonaro himself. Drawing on empirical case studies, this paper implements quali-quanti visual methods to operationalise specific techniques for interpreting bot-associated image collections and textual content across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X. To unveil the modus operandi of bolsobots, we map the networks of users they follow (“following networks”), explore the visual-textual content they post, and observe the strategies they deploy to adapt to platform content moderation. Such analyses tackle methodological challenges inherent in bot studies by employing three key strategies: 1) designing context-sensitive queries and curating datasets with platforms’ interfaces and search engines to mitigate the limitations of bot scoring detectors, 2) engaging qualitatively with data visualisations to understand the vernaculars of bots, and 3) adopting a non-binary analysis framework that contextualises bots within their socio-technical environments. By acknowledging the intricate interplay between bots, user and platform cultures, this paper contributes to method innovation on bot studies and emerging quali-quanti visual methods literature.

Exploring feminisms on Instagram

Sofia Caldeira — 2024-03-06

Over the past decade, Instagram has become increasingly popular and embedded in the contemporary experience of everyday feminisms. The platform allows for the co-existence of political, personal, mundane, and aesthetically-oriented content, created by both established feminist actors and “ordinary” people (i.e. not activists, career politicians, or celebrities). While feminist media studies have long studied similar practices of online feminism, historically the discipline has tended to privilege qualitative approaches, rather than more quantitatively-oriented digital methods approaches. However, the study of feminist expressions on Instagram can benefit from a critical engagement and selective embrace of some possibilities enabled by digital methods.This article offers a reflection on the use of digital methods’ tools and strategies informed by a feminist media studies theoretical and epistemological lens. This draws on an exploratory case study conducted by the author, which combined qualitative and digital methods to explore a wide landscape of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram. Grounded on this case, the article examines the methodological possibilities and challenges brought by digital methods, and the tensions that can arise from their combination with qualitative feminist approaches. It explores how digital analysis tools can be adopted in combination with qualitative analysis, allowing for the emergence of new insights, critical engagements with large amounts of data, intuitive explorations of datasets, while still allowing to zoom in on specific content for in-depth qualitative engagements. Finally, it also reflects on the ethical implications of a feminist approach to digital methods at the data collecting stage, positing methodological alternatives grounded on a feminist ethics of care.

Networked masterplots

Marloes Geboers — 2024-03-06

This article investigates engagement with propagandist TikTok videos shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with particular attention to the role of music and comments. By repurposing the infrastructure of TikTok sound-linking, our research upholds sensitivity to how this infrastructure enables affective and participatory workings of propaganda. We develop the notion of networked masterplots based on a situated analysis of how a specific sound, occasionally used in combination with pro-Russian hashtags, prescribes the creation of replicable linkages between three distinct video templates. The analysed templates, as we will show, not only intentionally share the use of the same song but adapt the theatrical effect of situation and suspense on the textual level of “stickers” or messages overlaid on top of videos. A selection of fifteen videos using the stickers – “What if they attack?”, “I am wondering how many will (un)subscribe?”, and “I am (not) ashamed” – in combination with a techno remix of the Soviet folk song Katyusha will be at the centre of our investigation. Arguing that in Katyusha videos situation and suspense are indivisible, we pay attention to the audiencing practices as they extend into both video comment sections and further memetic spin-offs. We conclude by reflecting on how TikTok sharing not only facilitates self-expression and social activism but also enables the weaponization of content within networked memetic environments.