The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces …

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2018 is Christian Strippel, whose focus is on the discourse architecture of German news Websites. The background to this work is a project to develop the tools to automatically detect and mitigate hate speech in comment sections in such sites.

Such hate speech is common in comments sections on such sites, and news publishers have a variety of mechanisms for addressing this, from netiquettes and forum rules through human moderators to automated moderation systems. The technical frameworks and affordances of such commenting spaces play a crucial role here as well, of course …

I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides:

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.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

For the user, this manifests in multiple server calls as they access the media organisation’s content; in addition to the media organisation, their devices also access various content elements from a range of other platforms. This is not …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

That relationship is also based on certain normative aspects – seeing journalists as watchdogs on behalf of citizens, for instance. But such norms are themselves founded in mutually accepted values, and the societal consensus that governs those values may be breaking down. Indeed, we may no longer be able to …