OLJ Task 1: Social Media and Society – Journal Article Analysis

Article explored:

Moody-Ramirez, M., & Church, A. B. (2019). Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election. Social Media + Society. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118808799

Comments:

This research article investigated how users may use memes to share popular political ideas in a social media group, specifically Facebook-meme pages, during an election. 106 Facebook-meme pages were analysed, with 53 pages focusing on the representations of one of the two front-runner candidates of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, and the other 53 pages focusing on Donald Trump.

The study found that Facebook-meme pages and profile photos of both candidates were negative in tone, with Donald Trump more likely to be represented in terms of his appearance, particularly his hairstyles and facial expressions, and Hillary Clinton in terms of the email scandal and relationships with people, often targeting her relationship with her husband. Most prominently, results signified two of the four variables analysed in the study, facial expression and hand gesture. This indicated a weak, but significant, difference in the content of the Facebook-meme pages of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Representation of gender stereotypes were not as common in the Facebook-meme pages as anticipated.  I found this particularly fascinating, as these findings illustrate trends in representations of gender and demonstrations that the use of gender stereotypes of female candidates are not as common as they have been in the past, particularly in newspapers, magazines or on television.

The summary of information and references provided a good background and avenues to further reading and research, while the tables and images made it easy to visualise the data. The language used was easy to follow and understand.

Even though I agreed with the overall findings of the research article, I did disagree with the methods of research used to gather the data and how it was reflected in the article. One surprise was that it wasn’t until part way through that article that it became clear that the analysis was only of the profile images of the selected Facebook-meme groups. They did mention this in the conclusion at the end of the article, in the summary of the study’s limitations, however this could have been made clearer at the start of the article as this factor alone could seriously skew the results.

References

Image Credit: Burst, Pexels, CC0 1.0

Moody-Ramirez, M., & Church, A. B. (2019). Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election. Social Media + Society. 5(1), Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118808799

Skidmore,G & BU Rob13. (2016, March 2). Trump & Clinton [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trump_%26_Clinton.jpg