Blog

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

Sharing links to the news on social media is now also a form of cultural currency, therefore. Compared to other forms of news transmission, sharing news links increases the speed and reach of the news …

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.

What is the role of Instagram in Germany in this context, then, especially in the context of the 2017 federal and state elections? How do …

The second paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Klaus Zilles, whose focus is on the distribution of disinformation on WhatsApp. The messaging platform has been embroiled in disinformation events in a number of countries in recent times, and has now begun to fund several research projects into the phenomenon, including the present study in Spain.

Spanish users are relatively active on the platform, spending more than one hour per day on average on WhatsApp. They are also increasingly using it to share the news, shifting away from more open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to …

We finish the sessions at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium with our second keynote, by Rebekah Tromble. She begins provocatively by suggesting that we as digital media researchers need to get over ourselves, so this should be interesting.

Many of the current problems for digital media research stem from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in the shutdown of many of the primary sources of social media research data – especially the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of leading platforms. Most applications for API access to Facebook are now denied, for instance; the Instagram platform API was scheduled for shutdown even …

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Tetyana Lokot, who points out the value of ephemerality for citizens living in autocratic regimes. Russia is one example of this: there are significant differences in how the state and its citizens define what networked citizenship means, and ephemerality plays an important role in this context.

Such differences manifest in understandings of whether citizenship is conferred by the state, or achieved by citizens in their actions; this implies different views on individual agency, too. Digital acts of citizenship further complicate this picture, not least also because digital networks do …

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Lucia Bainotti and Alessandro Gandini, who at presenting a tentative research protocol for studying Instagram stories. Stories are a means for sharing ephemeral content rather than permanent posts on the platform, and such ephemeral content has also become more popular across a wide range of other social media platforms. This represents an overall shift from an archival to a more ephemeral culture.

This shift needs to be addressed in the further development of digital methods approaches. Instagram stories can be understood as small social media stories that contain a plurality …

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Esther Hammelburg, who uses ethnographic as well as digital methods to study mediatised events. For such events, this work might include online and on-the-ground observations; screenshots of Instagram stories; Instagram posts themselves, as gathered via the API when it was still available; media diaries; and interviews with participants.

People engaging in these events post online partly simply in order to show the world that they are there – here, the aim is to create posts that are as permanent and public as possible, especially in the context of public …