'Big Data'

The second day of our P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference focusses on research methods, and starts with a presentation by the excellent Jessica Gabriele Walter. Her focus is on YouTube data donations. Conventional social media data access has been via platform APIs and third-party platform initiatives like Social Science One; an alternative to this are user-centric approaches like browser tracking or data donation, which is growing in prominence.

Such work is important because of the increase in media fragmentation and the growing importance of social media especially during times of crisis; but data access has been declining markedly …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation. He extracted similar data from the Google AI TV Explorer dataset.

Separately, he took 12,000 images addressing racism from …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Megan Brown, whose focus is on the impact of the closure of the Twitter API on public-interest research. The discontinuation of Twitter’s Academic API was announced in February 2023, and remaining APIs are priced exorbitantly and outside the reach of publicly-funded researchers; this has severely affected any further research on the platform.

Twitter research had been growing steadily since its inception, and was researched more than its use amongst ordinary users perhaps warranted. The present study explored the consequences of the API closure through a survey of social media scholars …

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to …

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Patrícia Rossini, who is also focussing on incivility. She begins by noting that this is a feature, and not a bug, of social media, and that conventional empirical research into incivility on social media tends to examine blatant forms (name-calling, profanity) rather than implementing more sophisticated perspectives.

Off-the-shelf solutions for such research like the Google Perspective API also tend to implement these fairly generic ideas, and often produce a merely binary score that shows whether incivility is or is not present. Such tools are often trained for industry rather than scholarly …

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

Today, this happens at the nexus of global corporatisation, digital information and communication technologies, and modern, AI-driven warfare, and is aided by the global digitisation, corporatisation, datafication, and financialisation of …

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides: