The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies. Such legal frameworks also often lack a concrete commitment to normative goals. And, of course, the platforms are also able to exercise …
We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.
WhatsApp has also been beset with mis- and disinformation originating especially …
And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jim Brown, whose interest is also in Mastodon’s Fediverse. The move from Twitter to Mastodon following Twitter’s muskification was slow and halting in part because it was seen as a new silo whose community was smaller that Twitter’s, which ignores the federated aspects of Mastodon as a platform – why is this so, and how may it be overcome?
There are many historical examples of federation, from FidoNet and other past platforms to labour unions and other offline community practices; these are concerned with person-to-person but especially also with group-to-group …
The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media. Yet there may be other challenges for community-driven, federated social media like Mastodon – indeed, there are a number of other platforms that now build on the ActivityPub protocol that is best-known for underpinning Mastodon.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Cindy Fang, whose interest is in the early days of the Clubhouse social media platform – an invite-only audio app that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and attracted a number of high-profile users (including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk). This userbase can be understood as a networked public, structured by the platform’s affordances – or in this case, networked listeners and active producers of content.
Clubhouse also provided a sense of community, with audio streams and comments on that content; this produces some social capital for prominent participants which is …
And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.
The protests shared time, place, and distinctive interactions, but on Reddit also unfolded in very platform-specific, bounded ways, in part because of the specific mixed Web 1.0/Web2.0 affordances …
The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.
These issues were brought to the forefront again during the imprisonment of former president Lula da Silva and the presidency of former soldier Jair Bolsonaro, which emboldened military leaders to involve themselves …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session are João Carlos Magalhães and Emilie de Keulenaar, who begins by outlining the recent history of platform content moderation – from the relatively minimalist approach of the 2000s to early 2010s, influenced by a maximalist and very American understanding of free speech and executed mainly through manual means, to the more interventionist moderation since the mid-2010s, recognising the multiple harms of unlimited free speech, building on a more European and international human rights framework, and utilising much more automated means of moderation.
Content moderation is among the most consequential and controversial systems …
The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.
This understood platforms as mere intermediaries, carrying content, yet more forceful interventions by platforms to shape communication practices – e.g. by deplatforming unacceptable speech acts and actors – have shown that platforms are themselves also active and self-interested stakeholders here, whose algorithmic interventions complicate the …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.
Online CT and CVE approaches were shaped especially in a post-9/11 world and represent the power dynamics of their industry; platform moderation that addresses such phenomena is informed by a larger ecosystem of governance that occupies a disproportionate area …
