I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

The project has been using interviews and observations in migrant camps for part of its work, but another component of it has focussed on migrants’ uses of Facebook. t studied some 179 pages, containing 75,000 posts and 2.1 million comments, over a period …

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

The next session at IAMCR 2019 starts with a paper by Matthias Degen, whose focus is on the challenges that journalists face when distributing news on Facebook in Germany. The platform is now reasonably well established in Germany, too, and this means that news outlets and journalists are also beginning to explore its use and perhaps normalising its use as part of their daily practices.

The project engaged in a quantitative analysis of the Facebook accounts of German political journalists from the federal press gallery (Bundespressekonferenz), and also conducted some short written interviews as well as a smaller number of …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

Homophily and antagonism drive such processes. But homophily is extremely common and not necessarily a problem in itself; some homophily is natural, and it only becomes a problem in extreme situations. The question is therefore whether homophily increases over time …

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …