Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This closing chapter discusses the public accountability of social media platforms that have eluded policymakers. We discuss the challenges in detection and mitigation of misinformation that emerged in the Brexit debate on social media. We also discuss the growing perception that social networking sites are opaque platforms unaccountable to regular users and governments alike, with sentiments towards Twitter bots and trolls often taking centre-stage. We argue that social media algorithms, in particular Facebook and YouTube recommendation engines, remain largely unaccountable to public scrutiny and that the criteria underpinning algorithmic decisions on which news stories are distributed to users are intellectual property deemed commercially sensitive and therefore inaccessible to the public.
This chapter unpacks the activity patterns of a group of 13,493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted the Brexit referendum and disappeared from the platform shortly after the ballot. The Brexit Botnet comprises 5 per cent of the userbase that tweeted the referendum campaign, a group of users that was removed from the platform by Twitter moderators. The Brexit Botnet sheds considerable light on the weaponization of social media platforms that was central to the referendum campaign, while also exposing the role of algorithms in which bots feature as the most simple, cost-effective, and flexible approach to gaming the social media attention economy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy developments in the aftermath of various congressional and parliamentary inquiries into foreign interference in national elections leveraging bots, trolls, and sockpuppet accounts to weaponize social media.
The book explores a data set of 45 million tweets about Brexit posted by a quarter of a million British users. This database was collected in real time and on a rolling basis to monitor the activity of a cohort of users we identified as the British Twitter Monthly Active Userbase. The data include posts from April 2016, the official start of the campaign period, until the end of January 2021, when the United Kingdom left the European Union. We take stock of emerging trends in the data pointing towards epochal changes in partisan politics, including the political realignment towards nationalist and populist values, but also broader societal changes feeding into polarization and echo-chamber communication. The book also provides an account of how social media manipulation emerged to national and then international attention in the run up to the referendum campaign and in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, including a detailed account of techniques employed to interfere and potentially distort the public discussion. The book closes with an analysis of the precarity and ephemerality of social media register, as nearly one-third of messages tweeted about Brexit disappeared from the public domain in the following years.
Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, this book presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.
The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarization and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion.
Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond.
This concluding chapter takes stock of the Brexit referendum as a milestone in the political realignment that moved Western democracies towards nationalistic and populist sentiments, a development accompanied by the upsurge in affective polarization, proattitudinal partisan news consumption, echo-chamber communication, and coordinated and inauthentic social media activity. We argue that the Brexit debate on social media provides a bird’s-eye view to political developments that would define much of the political landscape in the early 21st century and that are likely to continue defining much of the contentious politics in the first decades of this century, as technological change continues to trigger cultural, economic, and legal disruption.
This chapter presents the manifold methodological challenges associated with large-scale social media data collection, the creation of a database of monthly active Twitter users in Britain, and the process of triangulating geographic information to determine the user location. This includes the processing of geolocation data and the mapping of users onto electoral districts. We also considered the demographic biases of Twitter, the curation of the database, and the process of identifying political affiliation based on campaign advocacy.
The book explores a data set of 45 million tweets about Brexit posted by a quarter of a million British users. This database was collected in real time and on a rolling basis to monitor the activity of a cohort of users we identified as the British Twitter Monthly Active Userbase. The data include posts from April 2016, the official start of the campaign period, until the end of January 2021, when the United Kingdom left the European Union. We take stock of emerging trends in the data pointing towards epochal changes in partisan politics, including the political realignment towards nationalist and populist values, but also broader societal changes feeding into polarization and echo-chamber communication. The book also provides an account of how social media manipulation emerged to national and then international attention in the run up to the referendum campaign and in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, including a detailed account of techniques employed to interfere and potentially distort the public discussion. The book closes with an analysis of the precarity and ephemerality of social media register, as nearly one-third of messages tweeted about Brexit disappeared from the public domain in the following years.
This chapter discusses the weaponization of social media platforms for influence operations centred on the distribution of disinformation and hyperpartisan content, with the Brexit referendum featuring a host of techniques for influence operations that would rapidly spread across local and national elections worldwide. We revisit key events such as the deployment of data-driven microtargeting in political campaigns and the ensuing data lockdown enforced by social media platforms. The chapter covers the literature on disinformation, misinformation, and state propaganda during the Brexit referendum and concludes with a review of the evidence on state and non-state influence operations that sought to strategically diffuse content that heightened partisanship during the Brexit referendum campaign.
The book explores a data set of 45,476,692 tweets posted by 264,766 British users, a cohort we identified as the ‘British Twitter Monthly Active Userbase’. The data include posts from April 2016 until the end of January 2021 and were collected in real time and on a rolling basis. The first entries in the database start with the official referendum campaign and the last entries end with the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 December 2020. The unique and comprehensive nature of the data underpinning this book offers a valuable perspective on the Brexit debate that emerged on Twitter. We hope we can successfully communicate the many puzzling and some paradoxical findings drawn from a large, long-term, and rigorous data set of tweets. Given the contentious nature of the Brexit debate, and the disinformation onslaught on social media observed in the period, much of the book is about social media disinformation, manipulation, and information warfare.
In this chapter we discuss nationalism and populism in British politics and review the literature on the cultural cleavage that incorporated nationalist rhetoric in response to European integration and immigration. We test Inglehart and Norris’s dual hypotheses of economic insecurity versus cultural backlash as key developments underpinning the upsurge in nationalistic and populist sentiments, the former foregrounding the economic decline of the blue-collar working class, and the latter arguing that sectors of the population have become increasingly inward-looking and averse to progressive value change. This chapter also unpacks the political value space used to train a machine learning algorithm and the resulting analysis of the Brexit tweets.
