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The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform. Such platforms have been used as a refuge for refugees from mainstream platforms following their deplatforming, and enable them to further foment their extreme views; they have played a role in a range of political debates …

The final day at AoIR 2022 starts with a session on toxic behaviour, and a paper by Marco Bastos and Shawn Walker on the Twitter Compliance API. Twitter has a number of APIs: best known of these are the REST API (access to read and write Twitter data), Search API (to search tweets from the past seven days), and Streaming API (to produce a continuous stream of new tweets matching the search terms). The Search API is somewhat unreliable when searching for past tweets, while the Streaming API requires a permanent, 100% uptime connection to produce gapless information streams.

Finally …

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities. So, this research is interested in the categorical markers for information deemed to be (un)trustworthy in local contexts, the reflection of local milieux by global conspiracy theories, and the localised analysis of this research.

The project gathered data from Twitter in …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Cristian Vaccari, who provides a global perspective on visual disinformation. Visual content enjoys a cognitive advantage over text, and is more likely to be treated as realistic; verbal content, too, is more likely to be treated as true if it is accompanied by related images. Most recent social media platforms have a strong audiovisual component, therefore, but equally we have seen a recent rise in visual disinformation.

Images may also elicit emotions more effectively than text, and emotions in turn have implications for how information is processed: anxiety motivates people to …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg, whose focus is on references to co-morbidities in discussions of COVID-19: much of the rhetoric here implied that the death of some disabled people as a result of COVID-19 was simply a fact of life that was to be accepted. Disability studies have long shown that disability is often stigmatised as a form of abnormality; this is tied to capitalist logics, and often leads to the marginalisation and infantilisation of disability – positioning disability a as form of deviancy.

During COVID-19, this led to the emergence of the …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Tuomas Heikkilä and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in pseudoanonymous communicators during the COVID-19 crisis. These users use semi-stable pseudonyms, so they are neither identifiable nor fully anonymous, and the present study explored their role in political debate around the pandemic. This builds on the theory of connective action: organised communication without the presence of a central organisation coordinating activities. This can be more personal, more scalable, and more rapid.

Anonymity has long been studied online; it enables public participation while concealing real-name identities. But the platformisation of the Internet has …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Lisa Waldenburger and Jeffrey Wimmer. They begin by noting the rise in digital stress – at work, at home, and in public spaces –, and their project is designed to explore the experience of and coping mechanisms for such digital stress by users. Such stress is often caused by a self-diagnosed lack of media literacy, especially as self-service technologies come to substitute for previously non-digital and interpersonal interactions; these technologies contribute to economic rationalisation and social exclusion especially for non-tech-savvy and older people.

These moves, and their accompanying stresses, were exacerbated …

The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

In such countries, media will usually be more strongly restricted, and social media could thus …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Sebastián Lehuedé, whose focus is on data governance in astronomical data, with particular focus on the astronomical installations in the Atacama desert in Chile. The Atacama now hosts a large number of such observatories (often run by US and EU organisations), due to its remoteness; they produce some 16.5 petabytes of data per year, and the Atacama has been described as the Silicon Valley of data science. The state of Chile has also encouraged these developments, while Chilean researchers are granted only 10% of observatory time.

This is also seen as …