“I googled ‘Fat Barbie’, and this picture is nowhere to be found”, posted user Basedputin on the online forum Reddit. Attached to the post, was a picture of actress slash Hillary Clinton-supporter Amy Schumer. The post was concluded with a cryptical: “you know what to do.” So what did people do? They upvoted the Schumer […]
For Britta Muehlbach it was traumatic. On November 8 she was watching the news on election night together with friends at their apartment in New York City. “I felt anxious, the whole time. I did not know what was going to happen.” Muehlbach sensed that it could go either way, although her friends were expecting […]
Critical reflection of the DMI Winter School 2017 Els, Daan, Tanja and I (Lauren) were placed in group 3: Memes & Trolls 4 Trump. The main aim of our group was to map the community that supports Trump by creating and sharing memes on the internet. After some central brainstorming with the whole group (about […]
The emergence of fake news stories lead to a lot of debate during and after the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Wild claims were made by the campaign team of Donald Trump and by Trump himself. While it occasionally seemed like these claims were simply made up by Trump’s team themselves on […]
No president has ever seemed as keen on conspiracy theories as Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated president of the United States of America. But do people who watch conspiracy videos on YouTube automatically end up in the pro-Trump camp? And do some conspiracies point to Trump more than others?
Florida was the battleground of the US elections. With an even mix of Democrats and Republicans, Florida is often referred to as a purple state. Many Americans believed that Florida could drastically influence the election outcome. But how did Twitter users feel about Florida on election night? Did these emotions change towards the end of […]
On January 20th, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States of America. According to a lot of journalistic analysis, Trump would never have become so popular without the Trump-bubble on social media such as Facebook. This theory calls for research on how filter bubbles look like.
The filter bubble is hot. In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, every self-respecting media organization appears to be writing stories about the existence of the filter bubble and its (presumed) harm to democracy. Times when the internet was thought of as a public sphere, an open forum for deliberation, feel long gone. Many […]
Nederland kiest in maart dit jaar een nieuwe Tweede Kamer en de aanstaande verkiezingen brengen zorgen met zich mee. In de Verenigde Staten werd op grote schaal nep nieuws verspreid tijdens de campagnes. Samen met een internationaal team van data-analisten, programmeurs en communicatieontwerpers georganiseerd door de Universiteit van Amsterdam hebben wij aan de hand van data onderzocht of er een nepnieuwsklimaat in Nederland heerst, dat de uitkomst van de verkiezingen zou kunnen beïnvloeden.
“You’re such a Blue Pill. You know women are AWALT, you should definitely integrate TRP in your life and quit being such a beta.” The manospheric language seems incomprehensible to first-time visitors of manosphere webpages. When opening the “manosphere glossary” in one tab and “the red pill reddit” in another, step by step one learns […]