Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Maja Brandt Andreasen, whose focus is on Internet humour that normalises sexual violence in response to the #metoo movement. Humour is often dismissed as harmless (Maja describes this as the ‘just a joke’ discourse), and feminist reactions to such offensive content are attacked as undermining humorous discourse.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Antonia Vaughan, whose focus is on how we as academics can research the far right while minimising potential harms. This has been problematised by the neoliberal turn in academia, where precarity is the norm and critical research may be disincentivised. This promotes neoliberal ideas of academic individualism, encapsulated in the phrase ‘publish or perish’, or perhaps now ‘publish and perish’.

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

It’s Wednesday, I think, so I’m in Dublin for the first face-to-face AoIR conference since AoIR 2019 in Brisbane. It’s genuinely delightful to be amongst this wonderful community again at last. As usual, the conference starts with the conference keynote by Nanjala Nyabola, addressing the conference theme of Decolonising the Internet. She begins by noting that the vast majority of people experience the Internet in a foreign tongue; and it is appropriate to address this issue in Ireland, which has had its own history of having its national identity and language suppressed for so long.

Nanjala’s keynote is based on research which worked to translate keywords from Internet research into Kisuaheli, and the assumption from others has always been that this was an AI and natural language processing project; but it was not, and the real question is what it means to be human in the digital age. This was also her first academic paper in Kisuaheli; it was a project in decolonisation. How does this even happen? Ultimately, as so often, the story begins with the arrival of the British: the colonisers. And too many people in the world still don’t know what it means to be colonised – the damaging, scarring disruption of history and culture; one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in human history that reorganised societies for the economic benefits of imperial power, and a form of bureaucratised murder, systematised rape, and legitimised robbery.

In Kenya this lasted less than a century, but in the last decade of colonisation alone tens of thousands were killed, often simply for speaking out against oppression. In addition, lives were disrupted by introduced pests and diseases. This form of structural violence was documented in the files of the occupiers, but the larger loss of culture is less measurable, and the patterns of colonial administration often still continue. And the intention of the violence was to reorganise society to make money; to create ideal labourers – including by rooting out local languages by force in schools. That legacy still endures, and the trophies of this violence still remain in British museums, while culture is still being reclaimed and relearned.

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication: