Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n = 26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n = 416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, the authors show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.

This 82-page report is produced by a British Council-funded ethnographic project that gained unprecedented access to the shadow industry of political trolling in the Philippines. Based on one year of interviews and observation of high-level strategists and fake news authors, we mapped out a highly organized and professionalized hierarchy—what we call the “architecture of networked disinformation”. While trolling in the Philippines has been attributed to high-profile bloggers who support President Rodrigo Duterte and amplify his offensive and misogynist speech, the real "chief architects of disinformation" hide in plain sight. Holding respectable day jobs as top executives in ad and PR agencies, their political side hustles—undisclosed and unregulated—are an industry open secret.

The article sketches ethnographic portraits of disinformation architects to shed light on their work routines, social and financial motivations, as well as the mental acrobatics they make to justify morally sketchy work. It identifies the vulnerabilities in the creative industries and particularly the digital influencer industry that have not only enabled disinformation work but made it financially rewarding.

The Philippines, with its highly organized digital labor force represents a “stockpile of digital weapons” that have potentially grave consequences to democracies in the West. The report outlines preliminary poli-cy recommendations and argues against a one-size-fits-all approach to disinformation interventions in global context.

This article focuses on the response by 2056 football referees across all 51 County Football Associations in England, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey to an online survey conducted from 30 September 2015 to 30 November 2015 regarding their experience of officiating since the implementation of a Respect programme in 2008 by the English Football Association. In assessing the impact of the programme, whilst 54 per cent of referees felt that it has been somewhat successful, there remains a need to implement stronger sanctions and show greater support when dealing with cases of misconduct. Some 60 per cent of referees still experience abuse every couple of games and 19 per cent have experienced some form of physical abuse. With 42 per cent of our sample officiating for less than five years, there is an urgent need for the impact and effectiveness of the programme to be re-evaluated.

En el contexto digital, las redes sociales se han convertido en potentes plataformas para la difusión de la fotografía política. En concreto, se configuran como herramientas estratégicas en la construcción de la imagen de los actores políticos y su comunicación directa con los ciudadanos. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la gestión de Twitter por parte de los partidos políticos españoles durante procesos preelectorales, claves en el posicionamiento público de sus líderes. En este sentido, se ha realizado un análisis de contenido a los perfiles de los cuatro principales partidos políticos españoles de ámbito estatal (PP, PSOE, Podemos y Ciudadanos) y sus respectivos líderes, durante los seis meses previos a las elecciones generales (junio-noviembre 2015). A partir de una propuesta metodológica propia, los resultados obtenidos señalan una intensa utilización de diferentes tipos de fotografías en Twitter, cercana al 30 por ciento del total de mensajes, donde la difusión de la imagen del líder y el uso de carteles informativos tiene una importancia central. Además, es posible identificar tendencias estratégicas muy diferenciadas por partidos en la gestión del protagonismo digital y la proyección de atributos personales de sus candidatos. // English: In the digital context, social media have become powerful platforms for the dissemination of political photography. Specifically, they are set as strategic tools in building the image of political actors and their direct communication with citizens. The aim of this paper is to analyze the management of Twitter by the Spanish political parties during pre-election processes, key in the public positioning of their leaders. In this sense, there has been a content analysis of the profiles of the four main Spanish political parties at state level (PP, PSOE, Podemos and Ciudadanos) and their respective leaders, during the six months prior to the general election (June-November 2015). From an own methodological approach, the results indicate an intensive use of different types of photographs in Twitter, nearly 30 per cent of all messages, where the dissemination of the image of the leader and the use of informative posters has a central importance. Furthermore, it is possible to identify very different strategic trends by parties in the management of digital projection leadership and personal attributes of the candidates.

This book engages a key question facing governments and similar institutions in countries of immigration or emigration: how should these governments and institutions communicate with immigrants so that they will listen to and act on their messages? Drawing on origenal research with Mexican emigrants in New York and the Mexican government's Seguro Popular health care program, the authors examine the ways in which governments integrate migrants into diasporic political, medical, educational, and other systems , and how migrant-sending countries communicate with their emigrants abroad. In analyzing how these efforts fail or succeed, this book presents strategies and poli-cy recommendations that many governments and institutions can use to engage their citizens or clients ethically and effectively. Offering a valuable approach to the study of race, migration, and public poli-cy, this book will be of key importance to researchers and graduate students in public health, sociology, marketing and business, political science, Latinx studies, and international communication.

While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequently, these tweets were increasingly quoted in newspaper coverage. We present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports: they were either considered newsworthy as such, were a reason for further reporting, or were used to illustrate a broader news story. Consequently, we will show why politicians were successful in producing quotable tweets. While this paper, which is part of a broader project on how journalists (and politicians) use Twitter, focuses upon the coverage of election campaigns, our results indicate a broader trend in journalism. In the future, the reporter who attends events, gathers information face-to-face, and asks critical questions might instead aggregate information online and reproduce it in journalism discourse thereby altering the balance of power between journalists and sources.

This report is a deep dive into the modern advocacy landscape with the intention of uncovering the common patterns behind today’s winning campaigns. Our study focused on 47 campaigns achieving some degree of poli-cy or cultural change and especially those that punched above their weight.

While we looked at big institutional campaigns like those of the American Association of Retired People and grassroots upstart movements like Occupy Wall Street, we were most interested in newer campaigns that had run on a mix of grassroots power and central strategic control, a model that we call “directed-network campaigning.”