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The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.

The URL Shares dataset covers all URLs shared on Facebook that were shared more than 100 times on the platform, and adds monthly exposure and engagement data for some 48 countries and broad age groups and gender categories …

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 …

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 …

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 most common online reaction to problematic content is retributive: using offensive language to respond to previous offensive content, and thus potentially kicking of a like-for-like cycle of retribution. Onlookers tend to disapprove of such unproductive and uncivil exchanges …

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?

But this path model tests instanced behaviours that begin and end in a very discrete point in time; this does not translate so well to broader uncivil behaviours …

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.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social …

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 present study explores this in the context of the polarised issue of climate change. Here, social identity theory points to the existence of in-group …

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.

Such concepts are often operationalised very inconsistently and interchangeably. Various of these behaviours are conflated, while certain concepts are understood in very different ways by different studies. The present study categories such forms of digital hate as either holistic or specific: comprised of a range of …

p>The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Frederik Henriksen, whose focus is on the transformation of far-right political activities on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The far-right shifted the focus of its activities during this time, and joined forces with other anti-systemic actors, particularly pushing mis- and disinformation on the pandemic and the health measures implemented by governments to address it.

The present study sought to identify these discursive shifts in response to the pandemic, amongst far-right actors in Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and across multiple social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VKontakte, Reddit …

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.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user …