Conventional political campaigning strategies on social media have been extensively scrutinized by researchers; however, there is a shortage of studies focusing specifically on audiovisual communication by political parties on video-based platforms. Moreover, the adaptation of journalistic genres and formats in political communication has become increasingly prominent, challenging the relationship between media and politics as separate categories in contemporary media systems. This case study aims to address this gap through a detailed description of how mixed methods can be used to analyze political campaign efforts that utilize journalistic genres and formats on YouTube. It demonstrates a combination of manual content analysis with computer-assisted transcription and search techniques, and how these can be combined with qualitative contextual analysis. This resource emphasizes the integration of quantitative, qualitative, and digital approaches to political content in social media, contributing valuable insights to the field of social media analysis. The case study provides students with a theoretically and analytically grounded approach to political communication that aligns with ongoing shifts in hybrid media systems.

In contemporary hybrid media systems, political actors constantly experiment with new communicative strategies to influence voters during elections. Humour, sarcasm, and irony are examples of persuasive techniques that have increasingly been studied in a variety of contexts, yet there is still limited research examining uses of comedy and news satire genres in relation to strategic political communication during election campaigns. This article contributes to the literature through an exploration of what we define as ‘strategic satire’, focusing on how the two largest political parties in Sweden, The Social Democratic party and the Sweden Democrats, have utilised this strategy on YouTube. We assess strategic news satire across multiple dimensions including generic aspects, topics, and semiotic resources. Results reveal overlapping strategies, but with variations in implementation shaped by differing ideological foundations.

In recent decades, anti-immigrant, racist and nationalist attitudes have become increasingly mainstream, transforming public debates on immigration and immigrants in Europe and beyond. These attitudes and sentiments have been widely disseminated and amplified through digital communication, including commercial social media platforms. To better understand the relationship between racism and digital communication, it is necessary to move beyond media-centric explanations and simplified discussions of online hate speech and platform regulation. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-theoretical approach to digital racism, i.e., racist content produced and circulated online. The paper presents an understanding of digital racism in relation to four perspectives: networked affect, nationalism, masculinity and conspiracy thinking. It takes a relational approach to these theoretical perspectives and discusses how they could be utilized to understand and analytically approach digital racism at the macro, meso and micro levels.

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok’s platform features impact user engagement. Results reveal that party youth organizations had a prominent presence during the campaign, while traditional party actors were less established. TikTok tends to lean toward right-wing content, with right-wing praise being a significant predictor of user engagement. Semiotic resources such as stickers and emoticons but also added music, were widely used platform features, but these features had no or weak negative effects on user engagement. Added speech, particularly when praising right-wing politics, positively influenced user engagement, suggesting the importance of verbal communication on a platform characterized by multimodal experimentation.

The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.