The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Emma von Essen and Joakim Jansson, whose focus is on online hate speech towards women and foreigners, and the role of anonymity in enabling the expression of such hate; her project’s interest is especially in the Swedish context, and it hopes to predict the expression of hateful ideas.

The focus of the project is on relevant fora on the Swedish platform Flashback, which emphasised the anonymity of its participants but was subsequently shown to be less secure than claimed; the project scraped posts from these fora, and coded these posts …

Next up in this AoIR 2018 session is Julia deCook, who shifts our focus to Reddit – and particular its /r/TheRedPill men’s rights activism (MRA) space. MRA has grown in recent years, and represents a particularly virulent and misogynist form of male hegemony; Reddit’s TheRedPill forum plays an important role as a hub for this online community, which focusses on hypermasculinity, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist topics.

TheRedPill references the famous scene from The Matrix, and thereby suggests that men have been duped by feminism into an increasively submissive role in society. The forum has been reported by other Reddit …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Luke Heemsbergen, whose interest is in the evolution of radical leaking online, after the initial WikiLeaks moment. Originally, circa 2007, the platform suggested the possibility of a new form of radical transparency, yet for WikiLeaks itself that moment subsequently passed because of the way it has evolved further; other, more recent platforms have stepped into that breach to offer alternative models, however.

For transparency to be radical it must be able to subvert or disrupt dominant attitudes, and Luke defines radical transparency as disclosure that uproots expectations across communicative, organisational, and …

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 …

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: