I arrived a little late to Tanja Aitamurto's AoIR 2015 paper about crowdsourced journalism in northern Europe, where news sites used their readers to gather data on homeloan terms, for instance – crowdsourcing is thus defined as a mechanism for collaborative problem-solving that is driven by the initiator of the project; the locus of power therefore remains with the media organisation.
Another crowdsourced journalistic project examined the trading documents of a large number of stock market brokers to identify cases of short-stock selling; here, the project revealed serious misconduct an a Finnish bank executive was fired.
The final presenter in this AoIR 2015 session is Luca Rossi, who shifts our attention to Italian politics. His interest moves beyond elections, too, as elections represent a very specific political moment. Internet and social media use in Italy is still relatively limited – in 2012, only 62% of the population were online, and the main source of information remains television.
At the same time, some 36% of Italian social media users engage in political debate – an unusually high number. This may be due in part to the substantial connections between mainstream media and the political establishment in Italy …
Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.
Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …
The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.
The post-lunch session at AoIR 2015 is a panel on social media and elections that my colleague Tim Highfield and I are contributing to, but we begin with the excellent Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on recent Swedish elections. Sweden traditionally has a high level of election participation and substantial Internet and social media access, and social media have become increasingly visible in election campaigns, unsurprisingly this has increased over time.
The project followed the election-related hashtags #val2010 and #val2014, and there has been a substantial shift from making undirected statements on Twitter to using retweets to disseminate other …
The second speaker on this AoIR 2015 session is QUT DMRC PhD researcher Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the challenges associated with accessing data from popular Chinese social media platform Weibo. Weibo, meaning 'micro-blog' in Chinese, is a Chinese take on social media services such as Twitter. Sina Weibo is now the most successful of such services in China, with several hundred million users now present on the site.
There is a substantial volume of research now addressing Weibo, but inside of China much of this work still comes only from computer science fields, while …
The next AoIR 2015 session I'm in has only two papers, as one speaker has dropped out at the last minute; the first speaker therefore is Fan Mai, whose focus is on the use of Virtual Private Networks and anonymising proxy servers in China. Some such servers are used especially by expatriates living in China, trying to access western media sites that are otherwise blocked.
Such blocking is part of the Chinese censorship regime, of course, and a range of approaches to circumvention are rife in the country. There are very little hard data on the use of such tools …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Stuart Geiger, whose interest is in the collective block lists on Twitter that are developed by anti-harassment communities. This bypasses or sits alongside Twitter's own, 'official' anti-harassment (and anti-spam, etc.) efforts.
Stuart's own work began with Wikipedia, which has has a set of complex internal governance mechanisms and is increasingly using automated bots to militate against vandalism and other disruptions. Such bots are a form of bespoke code that is separate from but interacts with the sovereign, governmental code that underlies the Wikipedia platform itself.
The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.
Online campaigns have been studied for several years, and a general finding is that incumbents employ more position-taking strategies, while challengers operate more often in attack mode. This may play out on Twitter slightly differently because of the …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Michael Humphrey, whose interest is in life stories in digital spaces. Today's talk is focussed on the idea of white privilege, however: this can also be understood through the language we use, which colours how we see the world around us. We look at life through many filters, and tell our story through these filters; some of us take an agentic approach to telling our stories (we are at the centre), while others take a more communal approach (we are part of a group).
