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The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited. The current study explores this in the Swiss content, examining how often Swiss citizens search for information on upcoming referenda. Generally, such search practices may be related to demographic …

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals. This project explores this for the 2019 European Parliamentary election, which may be a particularly easy target for anti-elitist populist communication, and less so for people-centred communication.

The question here is how this plays out at the page and post level on …

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists …

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Maja Brandt Andreasen, whose focus is on Internet humour that normalises sexual violence in response to the #metoo movement. Humour is often dismissed as harmless (Maja describes this as the ‘just a joke’ discourse), and feminist reactions to such offensive content are attacked as undermining humorous discourse.

Maja collected memes from 9gag, Imgur, and Reddit that responded to #metoo and related controversies, and found that memes had a strong androcentric perspective that represented men’s views; women usually appeared in the background and in relation to men. Men spoke, and women were …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Antonia Vaughan, whose focus is on how we as academics can research the far right while minimising potential harms. This has been problematised by the neoliberal turn in academia, where precarity is the norm and critical research may be disincentivised. This promotes neoliberal ideas of academic individualism, encapsulated in the phrase ‘publish or perish’, or perhaps now ‘publish and perish’. Attention on articles has been increasingly metricised, including also via altmetrics that allow for connections and visibility in the public sphere outside of traditional academic spaces. This also valorises academic social …

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

This has resulted in the platforming of racism and antisemitism, for instance, and in the emergence of platformed conspiracism. This emerges from the confluence of the specificities of the platforms themselves, and the emergent practices of …

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

This is exemplified for instance by the Fediverse, a network of alternative social media sites that run …