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The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

In such countries, media will usually be more strongly restricted, and social media could thus …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Sebastián Lehuedé, whose focus is on data governance in astronomical data, with particular focus on the astronomical installations in the Atacama desert in Chile. The Atacama now hosts a large number of such observatories (often run by US and EU organisations), due to its remoteness; they produce some 16.5 petabytes of data per year, and the Atacama has been described as the Silicon Valley of data science. The state of Chile has also encouraged these developments, while Chilean researchers are granted only 10% of observatory time.

This is also seen as …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Paula Helm, presenting on data colonialism. She begins by contextualising this work as emerging from a computer science project designed to build a new social media platform called WeNet that sought to encourage the diversity of user networks in order to combat the (myth of) ‘filter bubbles’. But in order to encourage diversity, such a platform actually needs substantial amounts of data about its users.

Especially problematic about that project was its engagement with users from a wide variety of countries around the world, from its positioning in the European Union …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is on data infrastructures, and begins with Jonas Breuer, whose interest is in data protection in smart cities. Smart cities collect a substantial volume of often personal data all of the time, and the implementation of these data technologies needs to be thought through carefully; this project explored these issues through data walks in Belgian cities.

’Smart’ cities are often much less amazing than they sound, but Internet of Things technologies are now everywhere – there are even ‘smart’ rubbish bins, even if they don’t seem to work especially well just yet. In Europe …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Vivian Gerrand, whose focus is on alternative narratives that may be used to disrupt the misogynist manosphere and counter violent extremism (CVE). This is not only an online task, as such networks also extend into the offline space, and it must address both push and pull factors.

The present paper specifically focusses on the role of drawing in disrupting misogyny and providing alternative narratives. Such narratives directly address root causes such as real and perceived grievances; they acknowledge the kernel of truth underlying such grievances, and are delivered through credible messages …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Debbie Ging, whose focus is on Incel ideology online. Incels are men who believe themselves to be unfairly disadvantaged in then sexual marketplace, leading them to extremely misogynist ideation and sometimes action, with links to broader alt-right and far-right ideologies. But they have often been studied through temporary snapshots, rather than focussing on the dynamics in such communities, and the ConCel project that produced this paper is an attempt to address this limitation in the existing research. It takes a more diachronic, ecological, and ecosystem approach to the Incelsphere.

The project …

It’s Friday morning, and the warm glow of being at an in-person AoIR 2022 conference still hasn’t worn off yet. I’m starting with the session on radicalisation, and the first paper is by Diana Zulli and Marcus Mann. They’re interested in early-stage radicalisation, which has been studied in offline and online contexts for some time already. This involves the radicalisation of beliefs, but also social processes of connection, and both are motivated by the search for significance and the development of new social networks. But online radicalisation is also affected by the structure of online platforms, while there is very …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Giovanni Daniele Starita, whose focus is on the endemic populist nature of political discourse, especially in digital spheres, in Italy. Not all Italian politicans are populist, but they all seem to ‘do’ populism – well beyond typical actors such as Berlusconi, Grillo, and Salvini.

The focus here is on Italy’s new Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, exploring their uses of backstage, frontstage, and mid-region behaviours in their social media activities. This also draws on understandings of populism as a political style, and of celebrity politics – …

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

Such language constructs social imaginaries – and in the case of Democrat and Republican politicians, perhaps now multiple mutually exclusive social imaginaries – that are constitutive of the socio-communicative realities their voters believe they live in. Jenny’s …