Elections

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with Mona Krewel, whose interest is in (micro-)targeted advertising in elections; she explores this here especially in the context of the 2024 US presidential election. All parties use such advertising, and tend to target voters whom they assume are ideologically close to them; our understanding of how this works is limited, however, and based largely on self-reporting from campaign managers (which is not necessarily reliable).

A different approach to this is via the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, which is problematic for other reasons; the present project explored the targeting strategies of some …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …

The second day at the ACSPRI 2024 conference dawns with a session on social network mapping, and starts with a paper by our wonderful conference chair Rob Ackland. This presents work on an international collaboration around technology and political communication, with a particular focus on social bots. This explores especially the potential for such bots to connect people with different ideas online, with the aim to improve public discourse.

This requires us, in the first place, to understand where discussion and deliberation are occurring in online spaces: deliberative conversations require both diversity (or representation of different ideas) and argumentation (a …

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

Katharina notes that we are in a moment of polycrisis, with several crises all intersecting and influencing each other; in this, the role of news media cannot be overestimated, and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices would be extremely valuable. But we also live in a time of polarisation, which is complicated by the many incompatible …