Politics

The next session at AoIR 2019 starts with our paper on Twitter activity patterns in the 2019 Australian federal election, and I presented the first part of this so I didn’t blog it, but the slides are below.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is QUT DMRC PhD graduate Dr. Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the automated dissemination of conspiracy theories on Twitter – including suggestions that celebrities like Justin Bieber, industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and royals are actually shape-shifting lizards; that planes spread mind-controlling chemtrails; that the Earth is flat; or that the California wildfires were started by a new energy weapon created by the U.S. government.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Emma Baulch, who shifts our focus to Indonesian activist uses of WhatsApp. She focusses on ‘buzzers’: content creators who work especially in the context of Indonesian election campaigns and promote specific political candidates across various social media platforms.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Niki Cheong, who continues our focus on the uses of WhatsApp in Malaysia and Singapore. His project investigates the weaponisation of popular culture for political issues, in particular, and drew on walkthrough and scrollback methods as well as digital ethnography, interviews, and surveys with users.

The next speaker at AoIR 2019 is Amelia Johns, who focusses on private group chats on WhatsApp, especially in the Malaysian context. Malaysia’s political climate has led young adult Malaysian-Chinese political activists to organise through this platform, and WhatsApp is now the second most popular platform in Malaysia (after Facebook). It is also used especially for discussing news and politics, partly due to its use of end-to-end encryption.

The next AoIR 2019 session I’m attending is on WhatsApp, and starts with Natalie Pang. She begins by noting the significant popularity of this platform in Asian countries, as well as outlining its particular features of large-scale group broadcasting of messages and end-to-end encryption – which is especially interesting to users discussing sensitive political topics in these countries.

It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme is Trust in the System, and this is especially relevant also to Indigenous users of digital and social media platforms. How might Indigenous users understand ‘trust in the system’? Trust is a contentious term that embodies and disembodies Indigenous experience in the last 250 years; trust in data, online archives, and information on Indigenous peoples is not guaranteed, and many such technologies, online as well as offline, have been used historically to harm Indigenous peoples.

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean everything and nothing. For example, what does it mean to be inside an filter bubble or echo chamber? Do you need to be completely cut off from the world around you, which seems to be what those metaphors suggest? Only in such extreme cases – which are perhaps similar to being in a cult that has completely disconnected from the rest of society – can the severe negative effects that the supporters of the echo chamber or filter bubble theories imagine actually become reality, because they assume that people in echo chambers or filter bubbles no longer see any content that disagrees with their political worldviews.

Now, such complete disconnection is not entirely impossible, but very difficult to achieve and maintain. And most of the empirical evidence we have points in the opposite direction. In particular, the immense success of extremist political propaganda (including ‘fake news’, another very problematic and poorly defined term) in the US, the UK, parts of Europe, and even in Brazil itself in recent years provides a very strong argument against echo chambers and filter bubbles: if we were all locked away in our own bubbles, disconnected from each other, then such content could not have travelled as far, and could not have affected as many people, as quickly as it appears to have done. Illiberal governments wouldn’t invest significant resources in outfits like the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ troll farm if their influence operations were confined to existing ideological bubbles; propaganda depends crucially on the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles if it seeks to influence more people than those who are already part of a narrow group of hyperpartisans.