The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture -the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 U.S. elections as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are complimented with social media data to qualify the study's theoretical claim that a platform's network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media.The structural design of an environment -its architecture -intimately affects human behavior. This interplay between structure and agency is not limited to physical environs; it also applies to how users interact with, and within, online spaces. Scholars have argued previously that a digital platform's architecture can influence, for example: the norms of interaction among users (Papacharissi, 2009), the deliberative quality of their communication (Wright & Street, 2007), or their likelihood to enact democratic ideals (Freelon, 2015). 2

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.

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Advancing the concept of populism as a political style, this study compares the debate performances of two British party leaders, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, as they clashed in a pair of televised debates over Britain's EU membership ahead of the 2014 European Parliament elections. The argument tested is that under certain conditions, mainstream politicians will adopt a populist communication style while retaining a non-populist agenda. A mixed methods approach combines computational text analysis with a qualitative rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how the populist and non-populist style can be distinguished and compared systematically. The results suggest that Clegg, although maintaining a non-populist ideology, adopts features of the populist style after losing the first debate. Farage's communication style, conversely, remains stable to the point of statistical significance. This suggests that one explanatory factor of populists' success is the consistency of their message and rhetorical delivery, bolstering their perceived authenticity among voters.

This study investigates, over an 18-month period surrounding the Brexit referendum, the commenting activity of nearly 2 million Facebook users engaging with political news from British media or with the posts of referendum campaigns. We ask whether citizens' engagement with political news on Facebook motivates their participation with political campaign posts, and we examine whether users commenting on campaign pages trend towards ideologically reinforcing media. Overall, we find comparatively low levels of commenting activity on the official referendum campaigns vis-à-vis the media, and the majority of users (70%) commented only once. Looking at the subset of users commenting on both page types ('cross-posters'), we identify a general spillover effect from media to campaign pages, suggesting a positive correlation between political interest and online participation on Facebook. Reverse spillover occurs immediately around and after the vote, with Remain cross-posters active on the Guardian while Leave cross-posters' media engagement registers more diffuse.