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Conflicts over the management and governance of forests seem to be increasing. Previous media studies in this area have largely focused on analysing the portrayal of specific conflicts. This study aims to review how a broad range of forest conflicts are portrayed in the Swedish media, analysing their temporal, spatial, and relational dimensions. We applied topic modelling, a machine learning approach, to analyse 53,600 articles published in the Swedish daily press between 2012 and 2022. We identified 916 topics, of which 94 were of interest for this study. Our results showed ten areas of forest conflicts: hunting and fishing (35 % of total coverage), energy (24 %), recreation and tourism (11 %), nature conservation (8 %), forest damages (6 %), international issues (5 %), forestry (5 %), reindeer husbandry (4 %), media and politics (2 %), and mining (1 %). The overall coverage of forest conflicts increased significantly over the study period, potentially reflecting an actual increase in forest conflicts. Some of the conflicts were continuously reported upon over time, while the coverage of others exhibited seasonal or event-related patterns. Four conflicts received most of their coverage in specific regions, while others were covered across the whole of Sweden. A relational analysis of the conflicts revealed three clusters of forest conflicts focused respectively on industrial, cultural, and conservation conflicts. Our results emphasise the value of using topic modelling to understand the overall patterns and trends of the media coverage of current land use conflicts, while also highlighting potential areas of emerging conflicts that may be of special interest for planners and policy-makers to monitor and manage.

The use of hashtags has become an effective tool for activists to mobilize public support. This study explores whether, and in what ways, such hashtags have been adopted by politicians in power. Conducting a systematic, cross-national analysis, we examine how politicians use, what we call, activism-related hashtags. Using data from the Twitter Parliamentarian Database, we analyze the hashtagging practices of politicians in 10 countries: Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis explores what types of hashtags politicians use, and to what extent these tags are activism-related. We also analyze what activist causes hashtags used by politicians are related to, to better understand what causes are the most palatable to politicians. We further analyze qualitatively how the activism-related hashtags are used by the politicians. Through a combination of thematic analysis and frame analysis, we find that, in relation to the wide range of hashtags that politicians use, activism-related hashtags constitute a limited share. Our analysis also indicates that although politicians do indeed use activism-related hashtags, this can be for many different reasons and purposes, beyond merely supporting the cause or position of the original activist initiative. We find that politicians may join in with the key contention behind the hashtag, renegotiate the meaning of the hashtag to be able to align party-political ideologies with it, or engage with it by questioning or subverting it.

This article explores how “the left” meme and the character and emotional reception of taboo-breaking therein via the case of r/DankLeft—a USA-centric Marxist, Anarchist, and Democratic Socialist Internet meme community. It asks: what themes do popular r/DankLeft Internet memes relate to, how does taboo feature within popular r/DankLeft Internet memes, and can any differences in the ways in which taboo-related r/DankLeft Internet memes are received be discerned. In turn, it carries out a thematic analysis of 366 popular memes, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 41 taboo-related popular memes, and a comparative sentiment analysis of the comments these and other memes have received in r/DankLeft. The article finds that popular memes in r/DankLeft primarily relate to perceived threats to its community of users. It also shows that taboo-breaking does feature in r/DankLeft memes and that when it does correlative patterns emerge in terms of popularity and emotional reception.

Growing awareness of the societal consequences of datafication in recent years has given rise to a new form of civil society engagement called data activism. This article examines the discourse surrounding data activism on the social media platform Twitter. Through a mixed-methods approach combining computational analysis of Twitter content and close readings of Twitter profiles, we explore how new forms of civil society action related to data justice are articulated and linked to other forms of activism, conflicts and problems, and the actors involved in these articulations. Our analysis reveals a distinction between two articulatory patterns in the data activism discourse. The first involves grassroots actors, such as community organisations and individual citizens, who challenge existing power structures and advocate for social change. The second, on the other hand, is associated with academics, capitalists and policymakers who already hold positions of power and influence. This asymmetry is consistent with previous findings in data activism research. We encourage future research to extend these patterns, using additional methods and case studies, to further refine and contextualise the understanding of data activism within the civil society realm.

This Crosscurrent contribution presents programmable politics as an emerging keyword for understanding the complex interplay between technology, society and politics in the 21st century. Programmable politics has gained heightened importance in the aftermath of the pandemic that has sped up digitalisation processes that are the preconditions for programmable politics to emerge. Turning increasingly to engagement online, the pandemic constitutes a catalyst for programmable politics. The concept highlights both the potential for enhancing democratic engagement, and the risks of undermining it through the centralisation of control and manipulation of information flows. We discuss the transition from digital politics, characterised by the integration of the internet and social media into political discourse and action, to programmable politics, a concept that highlights the impact of platform architectures, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and non-human agency on the political landscape. In doing so, we call for a critical examination of how current digital technology reshapes the dynamics of power, control and resistance within the political domain.

We live in an increasingly digitised society. In an age of digital identities, rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence and ever more sophisticated software available, our methods for researching digital media must be flexible and adaptable. This book will help you to understand why researchers in this field choose and use particular research methods, equipping you to put these methods into practice across the whole range of undergraduate media courses. This book shows you how research methods can help us to make sense of the myriad of information we encounter online every day, from Tiktok influencers to viral Twitter posts. Complete with case studies in each chapter, the book covers both well-established methods, such as network analysis, and cutting-edge ones, such as interface analysis. It provides a crucial foundation for research in digital media, demonstrating the scope and potential of these tools. The book adopts an easy-to-navigate structure, taking you through specific methods in a systematic way. It shows you examples of classic uses of each method, and directs you towards further resources after each chapter.

In the current mass media landscape with a few corporate owners and operating under the propaganda model of communication aimed at manufacturing system-supportive consent, and the algorithmic-rent seeking business models of most popular social media platforms, we set out to ask whether Peoples still have power to take collective real-world action that may be counter to prevailing media tendencies. We study interactions in social media and the reports in mass media during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests following the death of George Floyd. We implement open-source pipelines to process the data at scale and employ the self-exciting counting process known as Hawkes process to address our main question: is there a causal relation between interactions in social media and reports of street protests in mass media? Specifically, we use network models to identify such interactions in Twitter, that supported the BLM movement, and compared the timing of these interaction to those of news reports of street protests mentioning George Floyd, via the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Project. The comparison was made through a Bivariate Hawkes process model for a formal hypothesis test of Granger-causality. We show that interactions in social media that supported the BLM movement, at the beginning of nationwide protests, caused the global mass media reports of street protests in solidarity with the movement. We also use more general Hawkes process model to understand the diffusion of specific influential messages in social media. Our study suggests that BLM activists have harnessed social media to mobilise street protests across the planet despite the concentrated ownership of mass media and the algorithmic rent-seeking business models of social media platforms.

This article explores the rapidly developing field of Critical AI Studies and its relation to issues of class and capitalism through a hybrid approach based on distant reading of a newly collected corpus of 300 full-text scientific articles, the creation of which is itself a first attempt at properly delineating the field. We find that words related to issues of class are predominantly but not exclusively confined to a set of studies that make up their own distinct subfield of Critical AI Studies, in contrast to, e.g., issues of race and gender, which are more broadly present in the corpus.

Many current discussions appear to see the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) as a given, inevitable development, and share an increasingly implicit belief that AI technologies can solve anything if only we take care of the potential side effects. But AI is not magic, nor is it the solution to all our problems. In this chapter, we draw on the notion of technological solutionism and challenge the common view that AI, if only constructed in the right way, can be a catch-all solution to a range of social problems, from unfair credit checks to racism and sexism. We argue that technological considerations must never dictate the conditions for social life. Addressing these issues adequately needs multi-disciplinary perspectives and particularly such approaches that combine technological expertise with critical social science and humanities analyses.

Frågan om jakt på varg bidrar till att legitimera eller öka acceptansen för varg ochvargförvaltning har stötts och blötts inom forskning, politik och förvaltning under många år. Inom såväl politiken som forskningsvärlden råder det delade meningar om huruvida jakten verkligen kan bidra till att öka acceptansen. En anledning till oenigheten är att det saknas evidensbaserade studier som genomförts med tillräckligt hög validitet och tillförlitlighet. Genom sådana studier kan man bekräfta eller förkasta att jakt som förvaltningsåtgärd bidrar till att påverka människors attityder, och i förlängningen beteenden, som till exempel kan bidra till att förebygga illegal jakt.

I denna studie valdes genomförandet av vargjakten i Sverige år 2021/2022 ut som en unik möjlighet att med rigorösa metoder fånga upp jaktens eventuella effekter på attityder till varg, vargpolitik och vargförvaltning, samt förtroendet för förvaltande myndigheter. Studien utformades med syfte att undersöka effekterna av licensjakt på varg bland allmänheten, samt bland direkt och indirekt berörda aktörer i vargfrågan. Studien kombinerar kvantitativa och kvalitativa metoder och består av tre moduler: 1) en kartläggning av allmänhetens attityder före (n = 5 470 personer) och efter licensjakten (n = 7 432 personer) i län med licensjakt och utan licensjakt, 2) en intervjustudie med aktörer som är involverade i eller är direkt påverkade av beslutsprocessen rörande licensjakten, och 3) en analys av sociala mediers bevakning av licensjakten för att förstå den bredare samhällsdebatten.

En slutsats av den här och tidigare studier är att det finns ett omfattande och stabilt stöd bland allmänheten för jakt på varg om syftet är att reglera vargpopulationen (Dressel m fl, 2021). Licensjakten på varg under 2021, som en enskild förvaltningsåtgärd, har däremot inte visat någon stark effekt på allmänhetens attityder till varg, dess politik och förvaltning eller tillit till förvaltande myndigheter. Den kvantitativa undersökningen fångade några små förändringar men utan ett tydligt mönster. Vissa län blev något mer positiva i vissa aspekter medan andra län blev något mer negativa. Mot bakgrund av teorier om hur attityder förändras, är det rimligt att anta att attityderna inte förändrades eftersom deltagarnas vardag inte påverkades av licensjakten. En slutsats av analysen av förvaltningsprocessen inför, under och efter licensjakten är att den, enligt de intervjuade aktörerna, lider brist på långsiktighet, förutsägbarhet och en gemensam idé om hur man åstadkommer förändring. Mer konkret ifrågasatte de intervjuade aktörerna aspekter relaterade till hela beslutsprocessen (till exempel grunden för vilken en potentiell jakt diskuteras, hur beslutsprocessen är utformad och vem som är involverad i den, samt att resultatet av processen överklagas i domstol). Detta påverkade aktörernas syn på förvaltningssystemet och involverade myndigheter och skapade frustration.

En slutsats av analysen av debatten på Twitter och offentliga Facebooksidor är att licensjakten förvisso rönt stor uppmärksamhet och att den är politiserad, men att diskussionerna i mångt och mycket har förts i stuprör där grupper delar och förhåller sig till onlinematerial som är specifikt för just den egna gruppen. Det finns således ingen viral historia, eller någon särskilt inflytelserik resurs (bloggare, diskussionsforum, nyhetssajter, etc.) som på ett genomgripande sätt präglat diskussionerna i dessa grupper under tiden för studien. Generellt verkar det därmed inte finnas stöd för att licensjaktsfrågan skulle ha förändrat exempelvis Facebookgruppernas sätt att agera och fungera vilket i förlängningen betyder att debatten på dessa plattformar har haft en begränsad effekt och räckvidd.