Gender and the political Twitterati: sex(y) variables in MPs' tweeting behaviour during the UK General Election 2015
Karen Ross (University of Northumbria, UK)
Tuesday 15 Sept 2015 7:00-8:00pm (MDT)
Register for this free webinar via Eventbrite
The 2008 US election is now regarded as the first to have shown the power of social media (in that case via Facebook) in both galvanising voters to take political action at the ballot box but also its power as an effective tool of political communication. Fast forward to Britain in 2015 when Facebook had already been overtaken by Twitter as the mode de jour for politicians to reach out to citizens, and the number of MPs with Twitter handles tweeting during the General Election campaign reached 450 (around 65% of all MPs). This webinar will discuss a recent project which focused on the use of Twitter during Britain's 2015 General Election and analysed the tweets from the most prolific tweeting MPs, sampling the top 20 women and top 20 men, looking at the salience of gender in terms of MPs' tweeting behaviour and the extent to which the reach-out potential of Twitter actually delivered, for example through followers' favouriting and RT activities.
____________________________________________________________
Karen Ross is Professor of Media at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK. Her teaching and research are focused on issues of gender, media and society including aspects of social media, public and political communication. She has recently completed a major EU-funded study on women and media industries across the EU and is the UK and European Coordinator of the Global Media Monitoring Project. She is currently writing a monograph on Gender, Politics and Media for Wiley. Recent books include: A Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media (2012, Wiley) and Gendered Media (2009, Rowman and Littlefield).