Twitter

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 …

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …