The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.

The impeachment process showed considerable political polarisation between the left and the right in Brazil; while many on the left supported the President, the right actively supported impeachment. Crucial to the debate on social media were superparticipants: highly active users who may be …

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.

Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds …

Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Marco Bastos, whose focus is on the Brexit referendum. He notes that a substantial number of bots were active in the Brexit debate on Twitter, yet many of these accounts disappeared immediately after the referendum. But it is also important to distinguish between different bots: there are legitimate bot developers that offer such accounts, while genuine, highly active users are sometimes also misidentified as bots.

Many bots in the referendum have disappeared, then, as have many of the URLs they shared at the time; these can now no longer be …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 is my DMRC colleague Brenda Moon, whose focus is on reply chains on Twitter. There are a number of ways in which replies are chained together, and in fact the term 'reply tree' may be preferable to 'reply chains': there may be many replies to the same original tweet only, or a long dyadic interaction over a series of tweets, or various permutations between these two extremes.

Brenda's work uses the TrISMA dataset of all tweets sent by Australian accounts over several years; this may miss tweets in a reply tree if …

The second paper in this AoIR 2017 session is by Daniela van Geenen and Mirko Schäfer, whose focus is on 'fake news' on Twitter. They began by tracking activities in the Dutch Twittersphere, and identified a number of communities within this userbase; within these communities, news and other information are being shared, and a process of social filtering takes place.

Within a two-week sample of Dutch tweets, the project identified the references to traditional and alternative media sources; the former represented established media including broadcasters, newspapers, and similar outlets, while the latter were often online-only, topic-focussed sites that were …

The next presenter at Future of Journalism 2017 is Anja Bechmann, who shifts our focus to news engagement within the private and semi-private spaces of Facebook. Here, the Facebook newsfeed serves at least in part also as a news platform, where news stories are shared and curated in a collaborative fashion. News, here, is variously a journalistically, user-, and algorithmically defined concept.

The investigation of the newsfeed can also help to detect 'filter bubbles', defined as non-overlapping content segments. Key questions here address source diversity, content diversity, and exposure diversity, as experienced by Facebook users; this can be addressed …