Polarisation

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2023 starts with a panel on the far right, and I’ll be slightly distracted as I’m also keeping an eye on the second half of the Hannover 96 – FC Magdeburg match, but let’s see how we go. We’re starting with Mathilda Åkerlund, whose interest is in the racialisation of sexual assault reports from Sweden by the US far-right.

Sweden has losing had a very positive international image, and ranks highly globally in quality of life, social welfare, and other indices – yet the international far right has attempted to reconfigure this image to claim …

The final speaker at this AoIR 2023 session is Zelly Martin, whose focus is on the female spreaders of health disinformation. This is also in the context of the US Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to abortion in the United States, which is part of a long history of activism against abortion, birth control, and female reproductive rights. These in turn are motivated in part by the racist fear that white people in the US are going to be replaced by people of colour, which sees reproductive rights as a vehicle for this so-called ‘Great Replacement’.

Such conspiracy …

The next presenter in this AoIR 2023 session is Kamile Grusauskaite, whose interest is in the deplatforming of mis- and disinformation – the removal of accounts for breaking platform rules, for instance on disinformation or hate speech. This has particularly targetted conspiracy theorists, yet such conspiracists still spread on alternative media or find ways to circumvent prohibitions on mainstream media.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as a form of stigmatised knowledge, and represent a form of deviance on the Internet. Kamile researched this through an ethnographic approach, tracing conspiracy theorists’ moves across platforms and attending two US conspiracist conventions, where …

The next session at AoIR 2023 that I’m in is on conspiracies, and starts with Elisabetta Zurovac, whose focus is on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. These seek to undermine trust in the established science and mainstream media coverage, and this is related to a broader erosion of trust in established knowledge. They encourage people to ‘do their own research’ and are often building also in important ways on visual content.

The visual culture of conspiracy theories draws in important ways also on screenshotting practices: images produced by screen capturing functions on digital devices which claim a certain documentary nature and appeal …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The CPI was formed by the federal senate, and broadcast on TV, symbolically replacing Big Brother Brazil …

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

The case study focusses on Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, who has been in the office since 2019 and therefore through the COVID-19 pandemic. She leads a minority Social Democrat government – an unusual setup in …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Elizabeth Poole, whose interest is in counter-narratives against Islamophobia and their potential for mediated activism. This incorporates a computational analysis of discussions on Twitter related to Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and COVID-19, as well as qualitative and network analysis of these datasets.

The counter-narratives against Islamophobia in these tweets might be understood as mediated solidarity, and in he Brexit dataset there was considerable evidence of such support for Muslims, yet this did not necessarily result in sustained supporting discussions in follow-up tweets; this might be understood as a form of …

The final paper in this AoIR 2023 session was my own, presenting on behalf of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, who also works with the URL shares dataset provided by Facebook via Social Science One. He also utilises the generative artificial intelligence tools now provided by OpenAI in order to examine the themes of and partisan attention to the topics circulating in discourse surrounding the 2018 and 2022 Italian election campaigns.

The URL shares dataset is centred on users’ engagement with URLs, and contains some random Gaussian noise designed to prevent the re-identifiability of users. The present project extracted the title and description of political URLs mainly …