My name is Tristan Hotham, I am a PhD Researcher at the University of Bath.

I study Facebook, social media, elections, engagement, content, party politics and campaigning.

My central interests are in social media, elections, political parties and campaigning. My specialisms are UK political parties and the use of Facebook. I utilise a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to open the black box of social media campaigning.

I hold two Master’s degrees from the Universities of Bath and Durham, alongside a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Exeter. I currently work on a ESRC funded PhD at the University of Bath – my thesis is titled; “Examining the impact and effectiveness of Facebook on party campaigns”.

My work has been featured in:

My thesis examines the Facebook phenomenon and its role as a campaign tool, most recently used so successfully by the Corbyn, Donald Trump and Brexit Party campaigns. Using extracted Facebook data and supportive external data sources such as the BES/EAS and Whotargets.me, this study examines the impact Facebook is having as a campaign tool online, alongside its wider offline implications for parties campaigning in an era of party change. The thesis examines political parties content approaches, engagement and virtual membership. Alongside examining the impact Facebook and social media is having upon how parties are campaigning.

I enjoy public engagement so please get in contact if you would like to hear about my work. Please explore this website, get in contact if you would like a discussion and please check out my thoughts via my Bitrate Politics Blog (above) and YouTube channel. See this video below about Facebook’s data access problems, they are restricting search results and making it very hard to examine the platform.

© Tristan Hotham, 2019.