Facebook

The next paper in this iCS Symposium session is by Amelia Acker and Joan Donovan, and focusses on new approaches to gathering metadata from social media platforms without relying on Application Programming Interfaces. Indeed, platform providers are generally unable to predict all of the ways in which users, including researchers, are likely to engage with their platforms, and this leaves loopholes that researchers are able to exploit.

The next speaker at the iCS Symposium is Yidong Steven Wang, who begins with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance in front of the U.S. Congress. This demonstrated the limited technical understanding of U.S. politicians, as well as Zuckerberg’s ability to evade the difficult questions.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Rena Bivens, whose focus is on non-profit anti-violence activists online. The literature on such initiatives is still poorly developed; there is a great deal of advice on how these organisations should operate online, but how they actually operate remains poorly understood.

Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

The first paper in the final session at AoIR 2018 today is SeongJae Min, who is interested in the role of algorithms in determining what we are exposed to on social media; the major finding from his research is that people’s choices matter at least as much as algorithmic shaping.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.