Join us at the Oxford Social Media Observatory (OSMO) for the first in our weekly visiting speaker series! No booking required.
Abstract:
Only about 3% of what people consume online is political. Almost all research on media and politics studies that 3%: content most people avoid, and the few who consume it resist. This talk looks at the other 97%. Entertainment, lifestyle, and influencer media carry political cues audiences do not recognise as political. Entertainment, lifestyle, and influencer media carry political cues audiences do not recognise as political. I argue that this is exactly why they work: what people do not recognise, they do not resist. I present the framework behind HIDDENPOL, a five-year ERC project that asks three questions. How much everyday media carries hidden political cues? Who notices, and who does not? And what happens to political values when content lands as ordinary rather than political? To answer them, the project combines multimodal classification of what people see on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with surveys, survey experiments, and field experiments across three countries. A first proof of concept comes from a field experiment in which participants followed alpha male, tradwife, or neutral accounts for six weeks. Wellbeing and gender attitudes shifted, even though participants did not enjoy the content and filed it under lifestyle, not politics. The talk makes the case that the most powerful political messages may be the ones nobody calls political.
If you have any questions, please detail myself Sophia Knight, Doctoral Researcher at OSMO (sophia.knight@reuben.ox.ac.uk), or Dr Andreu Casas, Director of OSMO (andreu.casas@politics.ox.ac.uk).
