Twitter

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Khayrat Ayyad, whose interest is in how media institutions in the UAE engage with their audiences via social media. The UAE is a global leader in the adoption of digital technologies, and there are a number of state-sponsored or -subsidised media outlets across the UAE’s emirates, alongside for-profit media organisations.

So how do such media engage with their audiences using social media? What tools do they use to enhance interactivity, and how do audiences respond to this? The present project conducted a content analysis of the social media accounts of three …

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

It is possible to distinguish between different actors in this, though: innovators, early adopters, and followers; as well as politicians …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

Analysis of Facebook data from 2013 and 2014 seems to support such patterns: after the major protests in 2013, there …

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.

New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Franziska Thiele, whose focus is on what communication scholars are saying on Twitter, and on whether this reflects different styles in international research communities. The principal focus here is especially on the ICA and IAMCR communities on Twitter.

Twitter has been an important tool for such scholarly communication over the past decade and more, though this is now under threat given the disastrous leadership of Elon Musk, but this activity is unevenly distributed: biomedical and social scientists appear to be especially active on the platform. Twitter use in the context of …

The third presentation in this hot IAMCR 2023 session is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on the discussion of generative visual AI (e.g. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and its relationship to artists. There is a veritable media panic, but also a genuine discussion about how such generative AI tools are drawing on existing, copyrighted art for their creations.

Artists have reacted to this spreading of digital creation with some degree of concern: it challenges their role in society, their opportunity to earn a living from their art, and their authorship of creative works; many artists see the use of their …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vanessa Richter, whose interest is in the shaping of AI debates and trajectories on Twitter. Imaginaries of AI are still evolving, and involve a diverse set of stakeholders: industry, governments, NGOs, academia, and the media. This project examined the accounts engaging in the debate on Twitter, and classified these into a number of different stakeholder categories; on Twitter, much of the debate appeared to be driven by AI experts (and the same is likely true on WeChat as well, as other research shows).

The present project builds on the idea of …

It is Monday, 8:30, the temperature is 25° already, and there is no aircon or ventilation to speak of, so this must be the first paper session at IAMCR 2023. The topic this morning is on artificial intelligence and Twitter, and we start with a paper by Mina Momeni, whose focus is on digital storytelling through Twitter bots. Social media have been populated by a variety of bots that can post and interact with human users on social media, and to some degree mimic human activity as well – and they are being used for both pro-social and disruptive …