‘Fake News’

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Detta Rahmawan, whose interest is in the transmission of misinformation via WhatsApp in Indonesia. This platform is very popular in Indonesia, also because of its privacy and encryption features. But this also enables the spread of hoax content on the platform.

The final paper session at COMNEWS 2023 today starts with Firma Qurratu’ain Abisono, whose interest is in responses to climate change misinformation. 72% of Indonesians rely on social media as their main source of information, but only 30% believe that social media is a reliable source. Younger people in particular are vulnerable to misinformation – they are highly influenced by digital media, and tend to expect information to find them rather than actively search for it.

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the European Union are very broad, for instance, but also remind us that AI is more than natural language processing and machine learning only; there are many elements that intersect in the emerging AI ecosystem, and we might be better served by thinking about ‘hybrid intelligence’ (also involving humans) than pure artificial intelligence at this stage.

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 speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session are João Carlos Magalhães and Emilie de Keulenaar, who begins by outlining the recent history of platform content moderation – from the relatively minimalist approach of the 2000s to early 2010s, influenced by a maximalist and very American understanding of free speech and executed mainly through manual means, to the more interventionist moderation since the mid-2010s, recognising the multiple harms of unlimited free speech, building on a more European and international human rights framework, and utilising

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 AoIR 2023 starts with a panel on the far right, and I’ll be slightly distracted as I’m also keeping an eye on the second half of the Hannover 96 – FC Magdeburg match, but let’s see how we go. We’re starting with Mathilda Åkerlund, whose interest is in the racialisation of sexual assault reports from Sweden by the US far-right.

The final speaker at this AoIR 2023 session is Zelly Martin, whose focus is on the female spreaders of health disinformation. This is also in the context of the US Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to abortion in the United States, which is part of a long history of activism against abortion, birth control, and female reproductive rights.

The next speaker in this fascinating AoIR 2023 session is Yvonne Eadon, whose interest is in the subscription-based streaming platform Gaia.com, the self-declared ‘Netflix of consciousness-raising media’. She describes this as a kind of conspirituality capitalism, which is perhaps accidentally encountered by people searching for life advice and spiritual content.