Blogs

The final iCS Symposium session continues the bot theme with a presentation by Pascal Jürgens. Pascal begins by outlining our current dilemma: threats of communicative manipulation via social media are rising, yet our access to the platform data we need to understand these activities is declining. But we may be able to address this dilemma by employing new and different methodologies.

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

The final keynote speaker at this iCS Symposium today is the wonderful Katrin Weller, whose focus is on what we do with social media research data: datasets that have been collected by researchers and have already been utilised in scholarly analysis. How are such datasets shared on and archived by these researchers? Sharing here means directly passing these datasets on for use by others, while archiving preserves them for potential future uses. Both practices potentially advance reproducibility and comparability, reduce digital divides in data accessibility between researchers and research groups, and save time and money in data collection; they are also increasingly important as the platforms lock down access to their data.

Researchers frequently lament the general absence of established data sharing and archiving protocols. These remain underdeveloped in part because of the ethical and legal challenges inherent in sharing datasets; the problems in establishing clearly defined and described archives for social media data, in the absence of universally accepted standards; the lack of search functionality for archived datasets; the diversity of the social media datasets collected using different methods and from various, continuously evolving platforms; and in some cases even a lack of motivation for researchers to share their data.

The final speaker in this iCS Symposium session is Laura Ianelli, whose focus is on understanding the supporters of conspiracy theories. Some such theories may be amusing, but many others are in fact deadly serious and can have significant negative effects. The networks for these theories can be closed epistemological networks with distinctive self-sealing qualities, and who are increasingly suspicious of broader social networks; this makes them difficult to reach for critical scholars.

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

The next iCS Symposium session starts with Fabio Giglietto, presenting his team’s results on the use of social media in the March 2018 Italian election. The project’s aim was to comprehensively examine the role of social media during the election, focussing especially on social media audience engagement with the various media sources available.

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to take a more considered and careful look at what is going on, yet the speed at which new data-driven technologies are being implemented across society, often without having been fully trialled and tested, makes this very difficult and gives a great deal of unchecked power to the companies providing these technologies.

My own keynote closes the first day of the iCS Symposium “Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation”. Here are the slides: