ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates a number of taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between populism and social media, and sets out four ‘traps’ for studying this relationship. These traps revolve around assumptions about social media’s allegedly ‘direct’ and ‘unmediated’ nature, representation and the uniformity of populist use of social media. Namely, these traps are: (1) mistaking directness for being ‘in touch’ with ‘the people’; (2) fetishising the ‘unmediated’ nature of populism, thus ignoring the fact that all political representative claims are mediated; (3) assuming that populist online communication is multi-directional and (4) assuming that populist use of social media is relatively uniform.
