Blogs

The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces through mainstream social media sites and on to hyperpartisan far-right press sites and even the mainstream news media. One of the vectors for infiltrating the mainstream news in this process tends to be Fox News, unsurprisingly.

The next paper in this iCS Symposium session is by Amelia Acker and Joan Donovan, and focusses on new approaches to gathering metadata from social media platforms without relying on Application Programming Interfaces. Indeed, platform providers are generally unable to predict all of the ways in which users, including researchers, are likely to engage with their platforms, and this leaves loopholes that researchers are able to exploit.

The next speaker at the iCS Symposium is Yidong Steven Wang, who begins with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance in front of the U.S. Congress. This demonstrated the limited technical understanding of U.S. politicians, as well as Zuckerberg’s ability to evade the difficult questions.

The next speaker in this session at the iCS Symposium is Vasilii Fedorov, whose focus is on the Russian social media platform VKontakte, which enables users to deconstruct official government communication in creative, visual ways. Such activity is especially strong during election campaigns.

After a quick break I’ve made my way to Copenhagen for the iCS Symposium “Locked Out of Social Platforms”, and the first panel of the day starts with a paper by Nicholas Proferes. His focus is on how power is manifested in the platform affordances of social media: these include affordances such as the persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of content.

The final speakers in this final session of AoIR 2018 are Lianrui Jia and Xiaofei Han, whose focus is on the changing politics of the major Chinese social media platform Weibo. It now has some 340 million users, and has a market capitalisation of US$13b. But Weibo remains significantly underresearched, and there are only a handful of major studies of the platform in the international literature to date.

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.

Then next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Eedan Amit-Danhi, who continues our focus on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and especially investigates the role of infographics during this contest. Such infographics have become increasingly important in recent years, partly as a result of the rise of digital and social media – but what makes specific infographics successful?

I’ve missed another session due to AoIR business, but I’m back for the last paper session at AoIR 2018. We start with Joel Penney, whose focus is on the use of social media by young people in the Trump era. He suggests that young people had moved from dutiful to actualising forms of citizenship, where political engagement is no longer just a duty to the state but aims to realise a better form of politics. Such engagement is also playful and creative, including in more partisan contexts.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Simin Kargar, whose focus is on the harassment of civil society actors on the Iranian Internet. Such harassment and suppression has a long history in Iran, and is affected by shifts in the availability and popularity of platforms – Simin and her colleagues interviewed a range of actors (journalists, media producers, activists, ...), in Iran and the international diaspora, to explore these issues.