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The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Elena Gapova, whose focus is on the Belarusian Wikipedia. Nations emerged at a particular historical moment, supported in part by a growth in print journalism, and subsequent changes to global communication structures, including the Internet, were at first seen as a as undermining nation states; yet more recent developments – including Wikipedia itself – have also been understood as tools for nation-building and nation-reinforcing.

This has been especially obvious in the case of the 16 post-Soviet nations, each of which have had to reposition themselves as independent, distinct nations separate …

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Mariëlle Wijermars. She continues our focus on the recent Russian election, and shifts our attention to banned presidential candidate Alexey Navalny and the role of YouTube in his campaign and related political activism.

Russians have used a range of platforms for political activism in recent years, including (in roughly chronological order) LiveJournal, VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram; this is also driven in part by the rapid expansion in Internet regulation in the wake of some of the earlier protest movements. Russia enforced a ‘bloggers’ …

It’s the first day proper of AoIR 2018, and I’m starting with a panel on politics on the Russian Internet; the first speaker is Galina Miazhevich, whose focus is on the presidential campaign of celebrity candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against Vladimir Putin in the March 2018 election and was exposed to a considerable amount of trolling and mockery.

Sobchak, then aged 36, is one of the most influential women in Russia; her father was mayor of Russia and well-connected to the Putin regime, and there are rumours that Sobchak is Putin’s goddaughter. She is a Russian socialite (‘Russia’s …

Well, we’re finally here: AoIR 2018 in Montréal has begun. We start with the keynote by Jason Lewis, who addresses the continuing rise of white supremacy in recent years. He begins by referencing the novel Riding the Trail of Tears, which discusses a retracing of the removal of the Cherokee from their traditional lands through virtual technology, and the possibility of Indigeneity in a digital earth.

But such a perspective clashes with white supremacy, which is well established in societal power structures even without further action to entrench it more deeply. Jason compares this with the multi-layer hardware and …

The final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.

If accurate assessments of air quality are unavailable due to gaps in monitoring …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Amelia Acker, who shifts our focus to the use of Instagram by Preppers: U.S.-based communities who prepare for the collapse of society that they are sure is coming. This research involves digital ethnography, archival works, and photographic documentation.

Prepperism is a new online social movement, and includes participants from super-rich “tech” preppers to reality show contestants. This is an extreme form of the emergency preparedness that U.S. populations have been told to practice since the height of the Cold War, but stands as a practice distinct from survivalism, which sees …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

The present paper focusses especially on the peaks of the 2009 swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks. What did English-language Twitter users discuss during these times, how do these events compare with each other, and are …

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Supraja Gurajala, whose interest is in using Twitter data for responding to air quality issues. Air quality is a major health issue in population and industrial centres around the world, and metrics like the Air Quality Index (AQI) and Particulate Matter index (PM) are key to its assessment.

Air quality monitoring stations exist around the world, but are unevenly distributed. How might the gaps in monitoring be addressed by increasing the number of monitoring stations, given the costs involved in setup and maintenance, then? One option may be to …

I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides: