Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session on 'fake news' is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on the discussion and dissemination of fake medical news on Facebook. In January 2016, the Italian public affairs TV show Presa Diretta covered alternative cancer treatments in a highly critical way, and further discussed these matters on its Facebook page; the present project examined the debate that ensued. This ties to broader concerns about public distrust in conventional medicine, and the online promotion of alternative treatments.

Personal experience is an important argument in such debates, and online audiences draw on such experiences …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Marco Bastos, whose focus is on the Brexit referendum. He notes that a substantial number of bots were active in the Brexit debate on Twitter, yet many of these accounts disappeared immediately after the referendum. But it is also important to distinguish between different bots: there are legitimate bot developers that offer such accounts, while genuine, highly active users are sometimes also misidentified as bots.

Many bots in the referendum have disappeared, then, as have many of the URLs they shared at the time; these can now no longer be …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Kirsten Gollatz, whose focus is on the institutionalisation of the 'fake news' controversy in Germany. The debate on 'fake news' there continues, and the term itself is controversial; it has now entered the German dictionary, but nonetheless remains ill-defined. There is an ongoing renegotiation of the norms, rules, and responsibilities of the various relevant actors in this context.

Germany already has some comparatively strict laws that address public debate on social media platforms: laws have long addressed hate speech, and now also target the dissemination of 'fake news', and platforms like …

The next session at AoIR 2017 is a panel on 'fake news', and begins with Giorgio Bertolin, from NATO (!). 'Fake news' is also an issue for NATO as a military alliance, of course, and NATO is about to publish a report on the issue that is called Digital Hydra. The focus is on exploring activities across different platforms, examining the role of blogs, and studying 'fake news' sites.

The term 'fake news' itself remains problematic, however: it has been used for anything from overtly fake and satirical stories to the spread of deliberate mis- and disinformation that promotes …

The next speaker at AoIR 2017 is Olga Boichàk, who begins by highlighting the role of social media platforms in structuring specific forms of human sociality. But this also means that automated accounts – specifically, bots – can imitate and affect genuine human interactions in these spaces. What does this mean for online discussions in the context of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, then?

This project draws on the Illuminating 2016 research project that gathered some one billion social media messages, and focussed especially on major retweet events (where a candidate's message is widely retweeted by a substantial number of …

The second day at AoIR 2017 starts with a panel on the U.S. elections in 2016, and Patrícia Rossini is the first speaker. She notes the limited focus in the past on how voters interact with election campaigns; much of the research has paid attention simply to the campaigning strategies themselves. But there is also evidence that users encounter a good deal of campaigning in their social networks, though they do not necessarily like doing so – in part because the discourse can be heated, emotional, and uncivil. Further, reactions to some discourse differ based on whether users agree or …

The first keynote at AoIR 2017 is by Andrew Chadwick, who explores what the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign means for our understanding of the hybrid media system. Political communication is in the middle of a chaotic transitional period, due in good part to the disruptions brought by newer, digital media; some older media have also been renewed by integrating the logics of newer media. This then represents a systemic perspective that examines forces while they are in flow.

The hybrid media system is built on the interactions of older and newer media logics in the reflexively connected field of media …

The final paper in this AoIR 2017 session is by Gemma San Corneliu and Antoni Roig, whose focus is on the study of selfies as performed personal narratives, in a broader context of narrative texts. How may such selfies be understood through an alternative genealogy that conceptualised selfies as small narratives?

Narratives are generally very important in social media; overall, they create identity at all levels of human life. New narrative models may be emerging from the analysis of selfies, and this project pursued the identification of these narratives through a series of case studies. The researchers focussed both on …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 is my DMRC colleague Brenda Moon, whose focus is on reply chains on Twitter. There are a number of ways in which replies are chained together, and in fact the term 'reply tree' may be preferable to 'reply chains': there may be many replies to the same original tweet only, or a long dyadic interaction over a series of tweets, or various permutations between these two extremes.

Brenda's work uses the TrISMA dataset of all tweets sent by Australian accounts over several years; this may miss tweets in a reply tree if …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Rebekah Tromble, whose focus is on the impact of digital data collection methods on scientific inference. Collecting data from social media APIs, how can we know whether we have 'good', valid data?

Twitter, for instance, provides a range of open APIs as well as commercial-quality data access via its subsidiary GNIP; the open streaming API offers up to 1% of the total global Twitter throughput, but potentially offers 100% of the tweets matching specific keywords or hashtags; and the open search API offers access to historical tweets, but also with …