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LLMs in Content Coding: The 'Expertise Paradox' and Other Challenges

And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

LLMs and Transformer Models in News Content Coding

The next speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in detecting stances in climate change coverage. This focusses especially on climate change debates in German news media, focussing on climate protests, discussions about speed limits, and discussions about heating and heat pump regulations.

Towards an LLM-Enhanced Pipeline for Better Stance Detection in News Content

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.

Using LLMs to Code Problematic Content in the Brazilian Manosphere

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

Paying Attention to Marginalised Groups in Human and Computational Content Coding

The final (!) session at this wonderful AoIR 2024 conference is on content analysis, and starts with Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam. Her interest is especially on questions of agreement and disagreement between content codings; the gold standard here has for a long time been intercoder reliability, but this tends to presume a single ground truth which may not exist in all coding contexts.

Assessing Partisanship and Polarisation at Various Stages of News Production and Engagement

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I presented the next paper, which explored the evidence for polarisation in news recommendations from Google News, building on our Australian Search Experience project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S):

The Kremlin’s Weaponisation of Russian Embassy Social Media Accounts

The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.

Towards a New Typology for ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour’

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

Ambient Distrust and Toxicity against Legacy Media on Twitter

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Pro-Russian ‘Ampliganda’ on TikTok

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Elena Pilipets, whose focus is on pro-Russian propaganda content on TikTok. TikTok establishes publics for imitation and amplification, and this has enabled a new form of ‘ampliganda’ (amplified propaganda) that thrives on affect and attention.

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