Social Media

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

And the final speaker in this early session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jaime Riccio, whose focus is on digital identities and the techno-self from a critical cultural perspective. Very early theories about communication built on the Shannon-Weaver model of encoding and decoding, while early cyborg theories built on Norbert Wiener’s emphasis on feedback loops; but this also raises the question of power – it enables the development of a technocracy.

Ordinary populations might feel oppressed by these developments; technopolitical developments create the potential for a panopticon that is driven by big tech and biopolitics. Cyborgs embody …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jiayi Ge, presenting the algorithmic kaleidoscope framework to explore the algorithmic self of digital media users. Various other metaphors being used for this – the ‘algorithmic mirror’, and others – are problematic, as the algorithmic self does not simply reflect the user’s ‘real’ self; rather, there are various selves (actual, ideal, intended) which are variously represented by the algorithmic self.

How do users perceive this discrepancy, and how do they respond to it? The present study explored this through some 23 interviews with users in Singapore …

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …

It’s mid-July and comfortably warm outside, so I must be in Singapore for the IAMCR 2025 conference. After some very warm welcomes, including from a Chinese lion dance troupe, we begin with a keynote by Ang Peng Hwa, addressing the theme of climate change which is central to this conference. He notes the increasingly obvious impact of climate change on countries in this region – less predictable weather, more severe weather events, and conflicting ideas about solutions. Climate change in this sense is a wicked problem – and one of the characteristics of such wicked problems is organised irresponsibility.

Singapore …

And the final speakers at the Bots Building Bridges workshop project are Mathias Orlikowski and Tony Veale, who begin by noting that bots can have a positive impact on online discussion by facilitating an increase in viewpoint diversity. Such bots might emphasise rational debate, but could also introduce more humorous perspectives.

One example of a polarised debate in Germany is the ongoing discussion about the introduction of a stricter speed limit on German freeways; in online discussions about this, a discussion bot could intervene by presenting an opposite point of view. Some such arguments could be pre-written responses to well-known …

The next speakers at the Bots Building Bridges project workshop are Zlata Kikteva and Arthur Romazanov, representing the DeLab (or Deliberation Laboratory) team at the University of Passau. Their team has developed a bot to take on moderation tasks.

This builds on research by members of the team on how humans moderate online discussions, which has explored key moderation strategies – soft moderation such as probing for elaborations, tone policing, social norm policing, agenda control, fact-checking, inviting experts top contribute; as well as hard moderation such as removing content and users from the discussion.

But can we delegate such moderation …

The final session of the Bots Building Bridges workshop project in Bielefeld starts with Gabriella Lapesa and Julia Romberg, whose focus is on e-deliberation as a digitally augmented version of direct democracy. This is said to have huge potential, but as yet does not scale up effectively: quality declines as scale increases. One solution to this is moderation, but human moderation is time-consuming and therefore costly.

Moderators must first decide whether an action must be taken to intervene in the discussion, and if so what type of intervention – policing, quality control, fact-checking, mediation, new idea introductions, summarisation – should …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …