Aliya Andrich and Emese Domahidi presented their research project on gender stereotyping of politicians on social media at the Three-Country Conference on Communication Science (DACH 21) on April 8th 2021. The large-scale computational content analysis of about 14 million Facebook posts showed that, in general, Facebook users do not hold strong gender stereotypes about female politicians. However, women candidates were still more likely to be described in terms of their physical appearance than male candidates. Qualities associated with certain prominent politicians resonate with their stereotypical images created by media (e.g., Hillary Clinton), while traits associated with other politicians, namely Donald Trump, reflect their supporters’ views rather than their media image. At the conference, researchers discussed theoretical insights about the role of social media data in capturing public opinion and outlined possibilities and challenges of computational methods for the field.
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