'Big Data'

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Patrícia Rossini, who is also focussing on incivility. She begins by noting that this is a feature, and not a bug, of social media, and that conventional empirical research into incivility on social media tends to examine blatant forms (name-calling, profanity) rather than implementing more sophisticated perspectives.

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

The next and final keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Noshir Contractor; his focus is on the potentials inherent in computational social science. Communication research has become central to any academic discourse around the world over the past decades, but this also means that we must take on the grand societal challenges of the present day.

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.

The post-lunch session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on platforms, and begins with Sherine Conyers. Her focus is on newsroom metrics, and she conducted an ethnography of networked digital newsrooms in Australia with a particular focus on their metrics tools. Her focus here is on two case studies which illuminate platformisation at work .

I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:

Continuing with the round-up of recent activity I began in my last few posts (covering new articles, new conference presentations, new research videos, and my lecture series on Gatewatching and News Curation), here’s an update on a few other writings and presentations for a more general audience.

Facebook News Ban Redux

Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In Australia, the NMBC resulted in Facebook blocking Australian users from accessing or posting any news on its platform for over a week, before a compromise that strongly favoured Facebook was found – and as I write this, the same is happening in Canada. I spoke to Michael about Australia’s long and tortured path towards and through the news ban, and shared our findings on what happened on Facebook during the Australian news ban (in short: live continued as usual, proving Facebook’s point that news matters a lot less to the platform than policy-makers might have thought):

Social Media Campaigning on the Voice Referendum

In other current events, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also begun to track the social media campaigns surrounding Australia’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be held in the final quarter of 2023. We’re still at an early stage of the campaign, of course, but already the PoliDashboard project (which our colleagues at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University have kindly extended to cover Australia) is picking up on the intensified advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and so is our Australian Ad Observatory operated by the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Together with my colleague Dan Angus, I published an overview of our observations to date in The Guardian recently; subsequently, I also appeared on the Centre for Responsible Technology’s Burning Platforms podcast: