There has been a growing interest in online politics in China. The research mostly focuses on the role of the Internet in two areas, one is its creation of a public sphere and the challenges it poses to the existing communication and political system, and the other one is online censorship undertaken by Chinese authorities to reduce the scope of political discussion online and keep the domestic cyberspace from being merged with foreign cyberspace. However, some political uses of the Internet in China have tended to be overlooked. This thesis seeks to redress this lacuna in research by examining the political focus of a recent Internet phenomenon the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This term might be more at home in pages of a horror novel but was originally applied by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or human hunting. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so called online vigilantes this study mainly focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norms transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. As the politically-focused HFSE is part of the tendency of Chinese popular protest, it is necessary to explore how the HFSE differs from and is similar to those offline protests in China. A case-oriented approach is applied to the research on HFSE. More specifically, the first part of this research puts the understanding of HFSE in Chinese historical context, with the aim of exploring the common dynamics between HFSE and those historical examples of Chinese bottom-up collective action. Then in the second part, a comparison between HFSE and recent Chinese offline popular protests is conducted in order to establish the pattern of politically-focused HFSE. In the third part, based on the empirical cases, the research on HFSE continues with an exploration of HFSE s underlying causal mechanisms to answer a key question of this research: why did HFSE occur? The study implies that there are continuities with respect to the Chinese bottom-up collective action as HFSE and Chinese rural resistances as well as urban labour strikes in the twentieth century of China tend to show similar dynamics, which are determined by the power structure they are exposed to. Moreover, the internal process of politically-focused HFSE differs largely from that of recent Chinese offline popular protests, which indicates that HFSE does not have an offline equivalent, although some of its stages can be witnessed offline. Furthermore, HFSE s occurrence is brought about by a combination of online and offline factors, which are relevant to not only the Internet and Chinese cyberspace, but also the political system that has contributed to the growth of official corruption and low government credibility in China.

This research project is an analysis of the use of digital propaganda by the three major parties in the UK 2010 General Election. In addition to this empirical aim, the study also employs the discipline of memetics to generate a theoretical and methodological approach with which to study digital propaganda. Memetics is an evolutionary theory of culture based around the concept of the ‘meme’ or cultural replicator. This study contends that propaganda can be understood as an evolutionary phenomenon, with the ethical implications of its use specifically addressed in each instance, rather than assumed as part of its definition. The memetic ‘methodological toolkit’ which is used to analyse the data on the 2010 election is a means by which key concepts from within the literature on memetics can be practically deployed. As part of the study this ‘toolkit’ is presented and the testing of it is continually evaluated in order to improve upon the initial design, something which also has implications for the use of memetic concepts within thematic textual analysis. The election itself was not an ‘Internet election’ in the way that the 2008 Presidential Election in the USA might be characterised. Such an election can be identified by a convergence of factors from within the party campaign structures and the wider political environment on a specific subject or individual – commonly a candidate for office – resulting in a high degree of spontaneous online participation and organisation amongst citizen supporters. This study argues that the UK 2010 election did not produce such a convergence due to low levels of voter enthusiasm, uneven social and financial resources and an inability by the major parties to capitalise on the potential opportunities for digital campaigning which arose.

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Las redes sociales han ido revolucionando las formas de comunicarse entre las personas, creándose comunidades a partir de un estilo comunicacional diferente a lo que conocíamos, este es el caso de TikTok, la cual ha ido teniendo una participación masiva, en cuanto a contenido y comunidad hablamos, en los últimos tiempos. Esta nueva red social no ha sido ajena a la intervención política de nuestro país, donde muchos de los candidatos políticos se han visto obligados a crear contenido en esta red. El presente trabajo de investigación tiene como finalidad identificar las características narrativas de los productos audiovisuales posteados por los candidatos a la presidencia del Perú de 2021 en la red social TikTok, mediante un análisis de contenido. El presente trabajo está visto desde un paradigma interpretativo con un enfoque cualitativo en el cual se plantea un estudio de caso aplicado a los tres primeros candidatos políticos según los resultados oficiales de la ONPE al 100% de la primera vuelta electoral. Se propone realizar un análisis de tres categorías relacionadas a la construcción de personajes, al contexto del contenido audiovisual y a las acciones de los candidatos políticos. / Social networks have been revolutionizing the ways of communicating between people, creating communities from a communication style different from what we knew, this is the case of TikTok, which has been having a massive participation, in terms of content and community we talked, in recent times. This new social network has not been immune to the political intervention of our country, where many of the political candidates have been forced to create content on this network. The purpose of this research work is to identify the narrative characteristics of the audiovisual products posted by the candidates for the presidency of Peru in 2021 on the social network TikTok, through content analysis. The present work is seen from an interpretive paradigm with a qualitative approach in which a case study applied to the first three political candidates is proposed according to the official results of the ONPE at 100% of the first electoral round. It is proposed to carry out an analysis of three categories related to the construction of characters, the context of the audiovisual content and the actions of political candidates. / Trabajo de investigación