The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Hazel Kwon, who continues the COVID-19 mis- and disinformation theme. Such conspiracist claims often focussed on powerful actors (politicians and others), and this represents a reductionist worldview; these claims can have very direct material impacts on communities, for instance when they question the established science and promote vaccine hesitancy.

Some such conspiracy theories focussed directly on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work on vaccination; the present paper examines the superspreaders of such ideas on Twitter during the last three quarters of 2020. Tweets were linked to major …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days …

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user …