Social Media

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is An Nguyen, with a focus on pandemic news avoidance on social media in Vietnam. A key aspect of this research project, therefore, is its focus on a non-democratic society: pandemic news avoidance has been studied in some detail already for western democracies and their saturated media environments, but the focus on Vietnam is new. How does news avoidance work here?

The project conducted some 21 face-to-face interviews with Vietnamese news users, with a focus on social news use and avoidance, and from these interviews developed a broader questionnaire which was promoted …

The final session on this first full day of IAMCR 2023 is on how audiences consume (or perhaps engage with) disinformation, and the first presenter is Hillel Nossek, with a focus on news consumption by Jewish youth in Israel. He describes this group as ‘newsers’: new news consumers. What characterises this group, then?

The study built on a representative nationwide survey of 673 young people of age 15-18 (i.e. not quite of voting age just yet) at state and state-religious schools; questionnaires were distributed during school hours to ensure participation. The top news medium for this group was social media …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …

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 …

My conferencing year continues with the IAMCR 2023 in a boiling Lyon, France – it’s hot here even by Australian standards. The conference opens with a keynote by Christian Fuchs, which I’ll try to liveblog (though frankly this proved a challenge when I last blogged one of his presentations at ECREA 2014; let’s see how we go today). More liveblogging from regular conference sessions to follow over the week, at any rate.

Christian’s focus here is on explaining the challenges of digitalisation for humanity. This requires an understanding of the relationship between communication and the underlying economic structures, and …