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The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Gregory Asmolov, who begins by discussing the strange experience of reconnecting with old school friends on social media: do we really want to find out about their political, ideological, societal views? Would we rather disconnect from them again? And if we do so, do we publicly announce that disconnection?

Such public discourses of disconnection might even be understood as disconnective violence – and crisis situations (in addition to bringing people together) can also lead to a wave of disconnections between people on different sides of a given crisis …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Yuval Katz. His interest is in the way that the COVID-19 lockdown unfolded in Gaza: even before the current war, Gaza had been under siege for decades, and Gazans have developed many mechanisms for inspirational resilience; this was on display also during the lockdowns.

Here and elsewhere, the pandemic was a cultural experience, too; much as in Israel, the pandemic was perceived through comparisons with the holocaust, and digital tools were mobilised to cope with and find solace in times of crisis, in Gaza the Palestinian population mobilised …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Kateryna Bystrytska, whose interest is in the use of Telegram channels for constructing knowledge about the war in Ukraine. There are now many such channels that provide information about the current war situation, informing local residents about current air raids, the types of missiles and planes attacking the country, and the likely duration of attacks; this enables local residents to make more informed decisions about whether and when to head to air raid shelters or protect themselves by other means.

Such channels have been widely adopted by the Ukrainian population …

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however …

The final presenters in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference are Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen; their interests are in the third-party fact-checking network employed by Meta. This operates on the basis of a Meta-provided online dashboard that highlights potentially problematic content, and the dashboard’s operation directs fact-checking away from political content spread by major political figures, and towards other forms of content.

Many fact-checking organisations around the world now substantially rely on income from Meta through their engagement in its fact-checking programme; this is part of a global post-publication debunking turn, but also creates a dependency on …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

Such intermediaries may be understood as cultural intermediaries, algorithmic experts, metricians, or content recommendation platforms; they may complement platforms or assist content production, and AI systems in particular retool, reshape, and rationalise the news. To explore this …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, who begins by noting the critical role of data annotation practices in shaping the machine learning process underlying generative AI; such annotation is a world-making practice, must align with editorial values and the journalistic ethos of objectivity, and can of course also reproduce pre-existing societal biases.

In a sense, then, the algorithms of generative AI must also seek to reproduce (and perhaps improve upon) the famous ‘gut feeling’ of conventional human journalism. The present project worked with developers and data annotations at Danish news organisations – but …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nadja Schaetz, whose interest is in AI hype in news coverage. Journalism has often uncritically covered the rise of generative AI, and swallowed the claims of AI companies about the capacities of their tools; this project collaborated with the Associated Press Local AI Initiative and conducted participant observation in local newsrooms to understand journalistic reactions to this initiative. Through the project AP worked with five newsrooms to provide AI-supported technologies.

What the study observed was not AI hype as such, however: not simply a gap between expectations and reality of …

I’m chairing the next session at this AoIR 2024 conference, which is on the intersections (or collision) between journalism and AI. We start with Sangeet Kumar, who notes the long history of complex interactions between digital media platforms and news publishers; news is just a type of content for platforms, while for news producers it is a mission and vocation. There is a substantial amount of traffic coming from digital search and social media platforms to journalistic sites, and therefore a substantial level of dependency.

This has led to some controversial government interventions like the Australian News Media Bargaining Code …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.

What role does the TikTok app and platform play in all of this, in terms of the app infrastructure, affordances, and affect? This project conducted an app walkthrough, engaging with the TikTok app like a first-time user and observing the experience of doing …