Blogs

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. That stack drew on that list to gather public posts from Facebook’s CrowdTangle data service between 2016 and 2022 (some 42 million of them, from around 918,000 public pages and groups); identify the 1,000 most prominent pages and groups sharing problematic information; gather all of their posts during these years, independent of whether they contained problematic information or not (some 70 million from the 953 still available public pages and groups); and examine – through topic modelling and practice mapping – what else they talked about.

Slides are here, and more live-blogging below:

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is the annual Steve Jones lecture, which this year is presented by my QUT colleague Jean Burgess and is on the impact of the newly emerging generative artificial intelligence technologies. This should not be confused with the substantial hype around artificial general intelligence, a technology which always seems to be just around the corner and has yet to actually eventuate.

Rather, this talk is about the more limited generative AI systems that appear to have invaded all sorts of projects, and seem to be universally indicated now by sparkle (✨) icons and emoji and rainbow gradients in user interface designs in both expert and consumer products. Only Meta has resisted this trend, and uses a ring icon.

Very serious money is now being poured into generative AI, and well beyond conventional venture capital: all of the major tech firms as well as a range of specialist AI Labs and AI ‘community’ developer platforms like Hugging Face have highly capitalised AI divisions now. This has also led to a vast increase in the amount of computing power and energy resources required got drive such AI activities.

How will we pay for all this sparkle, then? Google has already signalled the potential that AI-powered search may be offered under a for-pay model, and Google AI has also introduced a premium subscription plan. This is a significant shift away from advertising-funded free (or at least freemium) Internet services like online search and online document creation. Another development is the insertion of AI technologies into physical devices, from AI laptops to AI iPhones that incorporate specialised AI chips and on-device Large Language Models.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is by Pengfei Zhao, who is interested in the balance between retributive and restorative reactions to toxic online comments. This is likely also to be influenced by participants awareness of the existence of a broader group of community onlookers who follow exchanges between offenders and those who object to their offences.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Chas Monge, who is interested how third parties make sense of online incivility, and is using the path model of blame: is there a norm violation; did an agent cause it; was this intentional; are there justified reasons for this or could it have been prevented; and on the basis of all this, what level of blame should be attributed to them?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Seo Yoon Lee, whose interest is in toxic communicative behaviours, and especially counter-normative opinion expression in online communities. Such community dissidents are often understood as online trolls seeking to introduce community chaos, but this behaviour can be seen as both toxic or constructive: it is toxic if it is done simply to disrupt and aggravate, but constructive if it genuinely seeks to highlight alternative views.

The next ICA 2024 conference session is on incivility in digital environments, and starts with Stephanie Bührer, presenting a scoping review on digital hate. This includes any kind of digitally disseminated hostile content directed against individuals or collectives, and includes forms such as cyberbullying, online incivility, online hate speech, trolling, harassment, and other phenomena.

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.

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.