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Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

These opponents criticised Anne’s positioning as a feminist icon, and considerable discursive struggles between the two sides emerged. Anne is often depicted as a young girl with unmistakeable agency, unusual …

The first paper in the final session at AoIR 2018 today is SeongJae Min, who is interested in the role of algorithms in determining what we are exposed to on social media; the major finding from his research is that people’s choices matter at least as much as algorithmic shaping.

Concepts such as ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have become popularised in recent times, but there is a significant lack of empirical evidence for such phenomena; if anything, they are more prevalent in localised offline contexts than global online networks, where cross-cutting exposure is considerably more likely to occur. But …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.

Internet.org was subsequently renamed as Free Basics, and continues its activities; it was expelled from India, however. It represents an attempt to establish a socio-technical imaginary informed by a significant level of technological determinism …

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

Estonians are particularly strong Internet (and social media) users; this is especially pronounced for younger Estonians. When the European refugee crisis emerged, this manifested in the rapid creation of various …

The next paper in this Social Media and Society 2018 session is by Michael Bossetta, Chris Zimmermann, and Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, whose interest is in patterns in post-Brexit Facebook discussions. In particular, what is the role of emotions in these discussions, and what are their implications? The project gathered data using the Vox Populi data collection, enhanced with other data.

The analysis employed SentiStrength and other sentiment detection algorithms to assess the sentiment, emotionality, arousal, core emotions, and fine-grained feelings in Facebook posts from three major Facebook pages related to the Brexit referendum; most of the discussion took place here …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is Dam Hee Kim, whose focus is on what effects exposure to diverse political viewpoints has on partisan views. Such exposure has always been seen as important for a healthy democracy, but this poses two major challenges: audiences do not necessarily actively seek out diverse viewpoints, and such diverse exposure does not necessarily bring about the democratic benefits that theory would expect.

First, audiences tend to expose themselves to news that is in line with their established personal views. Today, they might see a variety of news also via Facebook and other …

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 is Moran Yarchi, whose interest is also in the uses of social media in election campaigns. But few recent studies have specifically examined the uses of social media by female politicians: much of the work on the role of women in politics still focusses on other matters, including mainstream media representation.

The present study focusses on Israel, where women make up only 27% of the Members of the Knesset. Media coverage continues to focus on male politicians, and the focus of such coverage is also more on personal matters, while for women considerably …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

We must therefore distinguish between the personalisation, privatisation, and emotionalisation of politicians’ social media profiles; to what extent are such forms of self-personalisation present, and to what extent do they engage the audience? The present study examined this for the Facebook of the leading party candidates in Germany.

Generic personalisation retains a professional …