Blogs

The next speaker in this fast-paced final AoIR 2022 session is Maximilian Schlüter, who is also interested in disinformative communities. He notes that a specific understanding of disinformation has emerged that does not necessarily capture all forms and formats of disinformation – today, disinformation is far more widespread and mundane than previously imagined.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform.

The final day at AoIR 2022 starts with a session on toxic behaviour, and a paper by Marco Bastos and Shawn Walker on the Twitter Compliance API. Twitter has a number of APIs: best known of these are the REST API (access to read and write Twitter data), Search API (to search tweets from the past seven days), and Streaming API (to produce a continuous stream of new tweets matching the search terms).

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Cristian Vaccari, who provides a global perspective on visual disinformation. Visual content enjoys a cognitive advantage over text, and is more likely to be treated as realistic; verbal content, too, is more likely to be treated as true if it is accompanied by related images. Most recent social media platforms have a strong audiovisual component, therefore, but equally we have seen a recent rise in visual disinformation.

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg, whose focus is on references to co-morbidities in discussions of COVID-19: much of the rhetoric here implied that the death of some disabled people as a result of COVID-19 was simply a fact of life that was to be accepted. Disability studies have long shown that disability is often stigmatised as a form of abnormality; this is tied to capitalist logics, and often leads to the marginalisation and infantilisation of disability – positioning disability a as form of deviancy.