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The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session are João Carlos Magalhães and Emilie de Keulenaar, who begins by outlining the recent history of platform content moderation – from the relatively minimalist approach of the 2000s to early 2010s, influenced by a maximalist and very American understanding of free speech and executed mainly through manual means, to the more interventionist moderation since the mid-2010s, recognising the multiple harms of unlimited free speech, building on a more European and international human rights framework, and utilising

The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jessie Daniels, who begins by suggestion that we are in a genocidal moment in the United States and around the world. There is a need to combat the rise of the far right – yet much of the research that engages with the far right still merely studies it, rather than developing approaches to fighting it.

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2023 is Bharath Ganesh, whose particular focus is on the long-standing white nationalist site Stormfront. How does community work here – indeed, can it be understood as an online community or might it be better understood as a networked public?

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2023 starts with a panel on the far right, and I’ll be slightly distracted as I’m also keeping an eye on the second half of the Hannover 96 – FC Magdeburg match, but let’s see how we go. We’re starting with Mathilda Åkerlund, whose interest is in the racialisation of sexual assault reports from Sweden by the US far-right.

The final speaker at this AoIR 2023 session is Zelly Martin, whose focus is on the female spreaders of health disinformation. This is also in the context of the US Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to abortion in the United States, which is part of a long history of activism against abortion, birth control, and female reproductive rights.

The next speaker in this fascinating AoIR 2023 session is Yvonne Eadon, whose interest is in the subscription-based streaming platform Gaia.com, the self-declared ‘Netflix of consciousness-raising media’. She describes this as a kind of conspirituality capitalism, which is perhaps accidentally encountered by people searching for life advice and spiritual content.

The next presenter in this AoIR 2023 session is Kamile Grusauskaite, whose interest is in the deplatforming of mis- and disinformation – the removal of accounts for breaking platform rules, for instance on disinformation or hate speech. This has particularly targetted conspiracy theorists, yet such conspiracists still spread on alternative media or find ways to circumvent prohibitions on mainstream media.

The next session at AoIR 2023 that I’m in is on conspiracies, and starts with Elisabetta Zurovac, whose focus is on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. These seek to undermine trust in the established science and mainstream media coverage, and this is related to a broader erosion of trust in established knowledge. They encourage people to ‘do their own research’ and are often building also in important ways on visual content.