Suchergebnisse

Op Eds, or opinion editorials, are typically published in daily newspapers and can raise awareness about a particular topic or aim to persuade others. For this project each student wrote an op-ed in which they presented their opinion or thoughts about the issue of islamophobic discourse coming from Republican candidates, especially Donald Trump.

Through mainstream discourses that infuse all components of society, settler superiority is naturalized in Canada. This process occurs at the expense of Indigenous peoples who continue to be displaced from the land, which is conceptualized as a 'resource'. Despite the seemingly static nature of settler colonialism, its hegemony is both contested and reinforced through the participatory social space of Instagram. Though it is primarily known for its aesthetic and visual communication properties, Instagram's visuality contributes substantially to public discourse, enabling resistant and political expressions around specific issues. Using data collected from Instagram, this article maps the social life of Canada's controversial Trans Mountain pipeline issue, as it develops under medium-specific affordances. Around the Trans Mountain pipeline issue, hashtags and imagery mutually inform one another on Instagram, connecting highly located and temporal experiences with national policies, as users performatively challenge and reinforce social relations as they exist under settler colonialism.

This article investigates how American interest groups' social media activity differs across Facebook and Twitter using a dataset of nearly 13 million posts from 1,500 organizations from 2016 to 2020. We find that interest groups use the two platforms differently. Groups are more likely to use Facebook for organizational maintenance and are more politically- and policy-focused on Twitter. Among groups, their type matters. Citizens' groups and unions are the most active users and get the most attention from others, while business groups are the least active and engaged with. We also highlight engagement between elected officials and interest groups on these platforms. This article encourages scholars to think critically about how the distinct audiences and affordances of Facebook and Twitter may provide different types of opportunities for interest groups — and other political actors — to reach social media users. This is especially important given the growth of social media and its potential to be a transformative tool for substantive policy change.

ABSTRACTCongressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and "echo-chamber" dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates' use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To fully comprehend the impact of these online political messages, we use a dictionary-based computational approach to catalog the tone of US House of Representatives candidates' messages on Facebook and the user responses they elicit during the 2020 election. This research speaks to the power of elite rhetoric to shape political climates and pairs candidate strategies with user responses—contributing new insights into the mechanisms for voter engagement.

Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. Our paper explores subversive (re)naming practices afforded by the free-form location identifying function on Twitter's user profiles. It then draws a connection to issue-alignment in relation to the contested Trans Mountain pipeline as a means of considering to what extent toponymic selection is linked with actual issue alignment within the colonial context of resource extraction in Canada. We apply a mixed methods approach, based in digital methods that work with Twitter's user profile location category. We extend our analysis through a qualitative reading of key subsets of the Twitter data, using a grounded theory approach to identify prevalent themes. In keeping with the anti-colonial nature of the tweets, we resist colonial categorization of the data and instead share an "un-typology" of Twitter toponyms, which we then connect to various expressions of anti-pipeline positioning. These mixed methods help us explore the entanglement of representational toponymic significance, infrastructural, in relation to the platform and the colonial nature of geolocational regimes online, and grounded, in relation to issue expression regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline.