Social Media and Politics

Dr. Betto van Waarden, Assistant Professor of History at Maastricht University, discusses his new book Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire. We begin by charting the technological developments of the 19th century and how it influenced the speed and scale of news production. Then, we discuss the rise of public opinion and how it affected the media's role in the political system. We spend the rest of the episode discussing publicity politicians, the transnational media system, and how many of the political dynamics we see today can be traced to the Age of Empire. 

The 10th Annual Social Media and Politics Year in Review! This year, we cover the platforms’ year in review reports, the EU's regulation on transparency of targeted ads, meta approaches to platforms, and implications of the synthetic public sphere. Here are links to reports discussed in the episode, and see you in 2026!GoogleYouTubeTikTokSnapPinterestPornhubZoom

Ivan Pardo, Founder of Solidarity Tech, shares how tech can solve organizing bottlenecks for political campaigns. We discuss how Solidarity Tech was used for digital organizing in Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign in New York and Catherine Connelly's presidential win in Ireland. Beyond tech functionality, we discuss how CRM platforms can give campaigns a human touch, how tech integrates with the culture of a campaign, and the potential downsides of gamification for volunteer organizing. You can read more about Solidarity Tech's origins and functionality here. 

Dr. Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor and Chair of Computational Social Science in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, discusses the concept of temporal validity in social media research. Dr. Munger breaks down why thinking about time is an important component of meta-science, particularly when it comes to evaluating the methodologies of social media research. We also discuss the Meta 2020 Election Research partnership, new pathways in social media research, the logic of quantitative description, and the challenges of political communication in the current grant funding and interdisciplinary landscape of political research. Here are the two articles we discuss in the episode: Temporal Validity as Meta-Science (2023)What Did We Learn about Political Communication from the Meta2020 Partnership? (2024)And links to Dr. Munger's latest books:The YouTube Apparatus (2024)The Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (2022)

Frank A. Spring, founding partner at Altum Insight and managing partner of Undaunted Ventures, shares how qualitative methods can understand the stories voters tell themselves about politics. Frank discusses his work using AI-moderated interviews (AIMI) and digital ethnography to analyze citizens' understanding of democracy, and how these insights can be used to inform political storytelling. We also discuss generalizability from this type data, the importance of cultural context, and the ethics of stories' relationship to facts.