Editors’ Introduction: Global Crises, Contentious Politics and Social Media

The contentious politics of social protest and highly charged partisan politics came to a head within democracies during the COVID-19 crisis, which is reflected in large part on social media. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 to be a global pandemic in March 2020 and three years later in May 2023, WHO announced that it was under control. During this period, in addition to the ongoing global problems of sea level rise and climate change, new conflicts also emerged that together with the global pandemic present an urgent need for cooperation by many stakeholders to address problems and reach effective solutions.

This special issue had asked for one or more of the following questions to be addressed in a submission:

• How does the use of digital media by governments, politicians, political parties and publics contribute to addressing emergent social problems in the context of contentious and partisan politics?

• How do affordances of contemporary social media predict partisan engagement and contentious politics in times of global crises?

• Are there different patterns across media platforms, national or subnational contexts, social or political groups?

In the context of partisan politics, social identity and polarization are important concepts that are likely to vary in form and degree across countries and subnational contexts, that can help or hinder effective political communication in a crisis. These important concepts have inspired numerous studies on the online information environment, given concerns that social media use may exacerbate polarization. While affective and political polarization are often seen as one in the U.S., it is not always the case elsewhere (Westwood & Peterson, 2022). In the first months of COVID-19, for example, social identity-based polarization (religion), but not political polarization (the party one voted for in the last national election), was found to be the basis for according blame for the initial spread of the virus in India (Arabaghatta Basavaraj et al., 2021).

Global crises call for a comparative perspective on digital political communication. A comparative perspective may be cross-national or subnational across states, or across levels of responsibility or activity or over time, or across social groups or political parties, for example. In the eight articles in this special issue, the content and degree of online engagement by publics, parties, politicians and governments are among the main points of comparison across various thematic and country contexts.

At the time of the call for papers for this special issue COVID-19 was a global threat, but as this special issue goes to press, despite the many variants in circulation globally, the Coronavirus is largely deemed to be in the rearview mirror for most populations. New crises have emerged that are highly relevant to the theme of this special issue. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and continues bombing residential areas. Then on October 7, 2023, Vladimir Putin’s birthday, Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens in their homes and at an outdoor music festival, and injured thousands more, Hamas leaders visited Moscow later that same month, and Israel’s retaliation led to the subsequent Palestinian civilian death toll in the tens of thousands, which led to global anti-Israel protests in many cities in 2023, as well as across many U.S. college campuses starting in April 2024. The tragic developments in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza are highly relevant to the topic of contentious politics, social media and global crises in comparative perspective and will undoubtedly be the focus of a substantial body of research in the future.

Protests in comparative contexts are the bases for the first two articles in this special issue. In the first article by Daria Kuznetsova entitled “Broadcasting Messages via Telegram: The 2020 Protests in Belarus and 2022 Anti-war protests in Russia,” public protests in these two authoritarian regimes are the basis for investigation into pro-government, pro-opposition, and neutral channels on this understudied platform, which is home to many channels. This study is important reading not only for those interested in authoritarian regimes but also for those interested in protests in democracies, especially given that the college campus protests in the U.S. in spring 2024 over Gaza were also using Telegram to engage protestors.

In the second article on protests, visual images taken with users’ mobile phones and posted online were the focus. In “The Mobilizing Power of Visual Media Across Stages of Social-Mediated Protests,” Yingdan Lu and Yilang Peng apply “unsupervised image clustering on millions of protest visuals found on Twitter from three protests in the US” – Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Women’s March – in order to systematically establish common visual content categories. They find stronger image effects in the “ignition phase” of protests than in earlier or later stages. This study not only provides greater insight into image analysis and social protests, but also into Twitter, now X, which has since stopped making data available freely to researchers through the API.

Moving from these two studies on protests, the next two articles focus on angry reactions and emotions on two different popular platforms – Facebook and TikTok. In the third article in this special issue, entitled “Emotionalized Social Media Environments: How Alternative News Media and Populist Actors Drive Angry Reactions,” Edda Humprecht, Michael Amsler, Frank Esser and Peter Van Aelst study the opportunity structures fostering “emotionally charged political discourse” on Facebook accounts in six countries – Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, UK and US. Results suggest that posts “from alternative and hyperpartisan media, as well as those from populist politicians and parties, tend to elicit elevated levels of angry reactions.” The authors express concern that these Facebook accounts may also “propagate incivility and polarization and facilitate the spread of ideologically driven misinformation.”

In the fourth article in this special issue, “Going Beyond Affective Polarization: How Emotions and Identities are Used in Anti-Vaccination TikTok Videos,” Sang Jung Kim, Isabel Iruani Villanueva & Kaiping Chen study anti-vaccine misinformation on this popular platform. The study shows that users “engage with emotional and identity cues in anti-vax videos differently, based on distinct message modalities.” The authors discuss implications for improving science information and addressing misinformation.

Misinformation in different country contexts is the central focus of the next three articles in this special issue. In “Right-Wing Authoritarian Attitudes, Fast-Paced Decision-Making, and the Spread of Misinformation About COVID-19 Vaccines,” Julia Schulte-Cloos and Veronica Anghel show how “specific contextual conditions shape information processing” in a pre-registered experiment designed “to reflect the fast and impulsive decision-making that is characteristic of online behavior on social media platforms.” Hungary and Romania are the country sites for the experiment, and results are most evident among respondents with “higher right-wing authoritarian attitudes.” The authors express their concern that the “fast and intuition-reliant nature of decision-making on social media” encourages the spread of misinformation that aligns with one’s ideological beliefs, “which could increase social polarization in societies.”

In “How Science Influencers Polarize Supportive and Skeptical Communities around Politicized Science: A Cross-Platform and Over-Time Comparison,” Sedona Chinn, Dan Hiaeshutter, and Kaiping Chen study how “science influencers’ use of group identity language has changed in response to recent events (Trump presidency, COVID-19 pandemic) and across different social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).” The authors conclude, “While there are slight increases in group identity language between 2016 and 2021, different patterns across platforms suggest that science influencers use different platforms to perform multiple roles of engaging diverse audiences, building ingroup solidarity, and defending against outgroup criticism.”

In “Politicization of science in COVID-19 vaccine communication: Comparing US politicians, medical experts, and government agencies,” Alvin Zhou, Wenlin Liu and Aimei Yang study social media discourses on vaccines by U.S. politicians, government agencies, and medical experts to estimate “the likelihood of government agencies politicizing the issue.” The authors draw on Facebook posts over two years during COVID-19 and demonstrate that “U.S. politicians heavily politicized COVID-19 vaccines, medical experts conveyed minimal politicization, and government agencies’ discourse was a mix of the two, yet more closely resembled medical experts;’” and “increasing infection rates reduced government agencies’ politicization tendencies,” among other results.

In the closing article in this special issue, a study of local government in Chile focuses on the outcome of the massive and violent economic protests in 2019, which affected the credibility given to local government and specifically mayors when COVID-19 hit. The study demonstrates that “mayors’ social media communication strategies depend on the functions that different municipalities perform in the territory, and that socioeconomic variables differentiate these activities.” The study also finds that “mayors of poorer communities made more extensive use of social media during lockdown periods than did mayors of more affluent municipalities.”

Taken together, the articles in the special issue bring together an impressive array of evidence and research designs that should serve to inspire readers interested in comparative political communication during crises. We want to thank each of the reviewers for their time, and each of the authors, as well as managing editor Regina Lawrence and the Taylor and Francis production team for their contribution to this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).