I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides:
The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on the activities of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, described as the Russian ‘troll factory’ and indicted for its involvement in Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
There are three forms of propaganda that have been identified in past literature: ‘white’ propaganda has a known source; ‘grey’ propaganda has an obfuscated source; and ‘black’ propaganda claims to be from a legitimate source but isn’t. Is this a useful classification in this context? Do the processes of propaganda dissemination …
The next presenter in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Oluwaseun Ajao, who shifts our focus to the question of ‘fake news’ on Twitter. Why is such content circulated on the platform? In part this is because these stories often generate more impact than ‘real’ news stories: this might result in significant shifts in political opinion, financial gains, or other outcomes that are desirable to the operators behind such initiatives.
The present study explores whether the veracity of a set of tweets might be able to be ascertained through automated content analysis. Are there semantic of linguistic …
The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.
One of the common targets in this complicated manoeuvre is George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire who is generally accused of funding liberal civil society institutions and has been attacked by …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.
User information is also incomplete, and geodata is largely unreliable and limited to some 1% of all tweets. Further, genuine users are mixed with bots in the datasets – better bot …
I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.
Keyword query data collected via the Twitter API are not representative of the underlying population: it returns representative, but not necessarily complete data. When the rate limits are hit, the data are truncated, though not on the basis of specific features. The biases that result from such selection are likely to be substantial.
What factors drive such search API sampling, then? Content …
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.
In Britain, the referendum was also decided strongly along geographic lines (city vs. country, England vs. Scotland) – so is there a geographic element to any echo chamber patterns that may exist here? The present study captured pro- and …
The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.
In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot …
The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):
The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.
But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.
How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …
