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Social countermarketing (SCM) aims at influencing existing socio-cultural norms, public policies or political decision-making. Existing empirical accounts of SCM give limited insights into their success. The authors analyze SCM strategies and their public resonance by studying the diagnostic and prognostic frames and responsibility attributions that are used in the debates.

The authors focus on two online SCM campaigns in the Netherlands that are targeted against over-feeding of chickens for consumption and the selling of low-priced meat. The authors conducted a quantitative content analysis (N = 3,902) of these debates on Twitter for a two-year period (July 2015 to June 2017).

The results show that citizens play an important role for the amplification of SCM campaigns. Diagnostic and prognostic frames about meat selling practices are among the most popular ones while the importance of mobilization messages differs per case. This can be explained by the proximity of these frames to citizens' daily life experiences.

The apparent willingness of citizens to both tweet and retweet calls for mobilization might give messages by environmental NGOs third-party endorsement. This strengthens their position and visibility in the debates, which are both of strategic value. The analysis of actor responsibility can identify reputational risks for companies in contested industries such as mass meat production.

The findings enhance professional understanding of designing campaign messages and refine SCM success in terms of resonance, since resonance indicates amplification and third-party endorsement.

In small group settings, is it the position in social networks or the content of communication that constitutes a leader? Studies focussing on the content suggest that leadership consists in creating and promoting meanings, whereas studies focussing on the connections stress that it is the network position that ‘makes a leader’. These two dimensions of leadership communication style have not been compared yet. To fill this gap, this chapter applies an emerging approach – socio-semantic network analysis – to jointly consider the content of, and the connections, in leaders' communication. Using a multisource dataset, we empirically study the social network positions (social network analysis) and the content of communication (semantic network analysis) of three leaders in a creative collective. Our findings reveal that different styles of leadership make diverse use of the content and the connections in a small group. The academic and practical implications are outlined.

Research into the emergence of a hype requires a mixed methods approach that takes into account both the evolution over time and mutual influences across different types of media. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodological approach to detect an emerging hype in online communications.

The paper combines Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series modelling and semantic co-word networks, and this combination of methods provides a view on the emergence and development of a hype at the level of mutual influences across a heterogeneous set of newspaper and blog data. The subject scope of the paper is the climategate hype. The climategate hype was triggered by the online publication of a set of hacked e-mails belonging to climate researchers at the East Anglia University in November 2009.

The main findings show that the climategate hype was initiated in the blogs, and the newspapers were reacting to the blogs. At the level of semantics, the blogs and the newspapers framed the issue from opposite perspectives.

The combination of methods contributes theoretical insights to how blogs interact with more traditional media on hype generation and methodological insights to internet researchers investigating emergent online hypes. The method calls for further validation.

Investigating the emergence and evolution of a hype, and the interaction of the two media is relevant for journalists in becoming more reflexive in their practices and the cues from the outside world.

The paper is novel in its combination of the two specific methods, ARIMA time series modelling and co-word networks and its attempt to identify the media origins of a hype, and especially the interaction between blogs and newspapers.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the structure of evolving debates in online discussion forums to see how science‐related debates evolve over time.

A graph‐based approach is applied to analyse the structure of graphs of connected terms in online debates. A number of different graph properties, such as the Densification Power Law (DPL), diameter (γ) and effective diameter (δ), are used to observe the properties of the graphs over time.

The graphs of connected terms obey the DPL and the effective diameters (δ) of the graphs tend to shrink as the debates progress. Slight fluctuations can occur, however, when new terms are integrated into the graphs. These two properties suggest that a graph of connected terms can be modelled through a number of blocks of terms, each of which becomes densely connected over time as indicated by δ and DPL plots.

This paper proposes observing the dynamic changes of evolving debates by using graphs of connected terms. The structures and properties of these graphs may be useful for understanding the evolution of public debates about controversial science‐related topics, such as embryonic stem cell research, and to track debates that can potentially explode into major issues.

The purpose of this paper is to present a study about gender differences in the climate change communication on Twitter and in the use of affordances on Twitter.

The data set consists of about 250,000 tweets and retweets for which the authors’ gender was identified. While content of tweets and hashtags used were analysed for common topics and specific contexts, the usernames that were proportionately more frequently mentioned by either male or female tweeters were coded according to the usernames’ stance in the climate change debate into convinced (that climate change is caused by humans), sceptics, neutrals and unclear groups, and according to the type or role of the user account (e.g. campaign, organization, private person).

The results indicate that overall male and female tweeters use very similar language in their tweets, but clear differences were observed in the use of hashtags and usernames, with female tweeters mentioning significantly more campaigns and organizations with a convinced attitude towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, while male tweeters mention significantly more private persons and usernames with a sceptical stance. The differences were even greater when retweets and duplicate tweets by the same author were removed from the data, indicating how retweeting can significantly influence the results.

On a theoretical level the results increase the understanding for how women and men view and engage with climate change. This has practical implications for organizations interested in developing communication strategies for reaching and engaging female and male audiences on Twitter. While female tweeters can be targeted via local campaigns and news media, male tweeters seem to follow more political and scientific information. The results from the present research also showed that more research about the meaning of retweeting is needed, as the authors have shown how retweets can have a significant impact on the results.

The findings contribute towards increased understanding of both gender differences in the climate change debate and in social media use in general. Beyond that this research showed how retweeting may have a significant impact on research where tweets are used as a data source.

Purpose – To consider the issues of cognitive freedom and neuropolitics via a comparison of d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) use in the 1960s and the emerging twenty-first century debate about nootropics.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing upon theoretical concepts from the study of biopolitics and on the tools of narrative policy analysis, this qualitative analysis uses multiple sources from scientific, mass media, regulatory, and the secondary literature.

Findings – LSD use in the 1950s and 1960s caused an unprecedented social confrontation with the consequences of a key sector in society deciding to use synthetic chemicals to alter personality and consciousness in ways that did not necessarily accord with mainstream society. As such, the era contains key lessons that can inform the new debate about neurological enhancement.

Research limitations/implications – The present study provides a starting point and historical context for development of regulatory policy for the coming era of nootropics and cognitive enhancement.

Originality – This chapter analyzes LSD use in the 1950s and 1960s not as a form of moral panic but as a technological adaptation that raised crucial questions about the possibilities and limits of psychedelic citizenship.