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FGZ RISC 2024

Symposium ‘Indicators of Social Cohesion’ of the Research Institute Social Cohesion, Hamburg, 24-26 April 2024

Snurb — Saturday 27 April 2024 05:50

Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media: The Case of the Australian Voice to Parliament Referendum (FGZ RISC 2024)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | FGZ RISC 2024 |

Indicators of Social Cohesion in Social Media and Online Media

Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media: The Case of the Australian Voice to Parliament Referendum

Axel Bruns

  • 25 Apr. 2024 – Keynote presented at the Indicators of Social Cohesion in Social Media and Online Media symposium, Hamburg

Presentation Slides

Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media: The Case of the Australian Voice to Parliament Referendum from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 22:25

Tracing the Changing Nuclear Energy Debate in the German Twittersphere

Politics | Government | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | FGZ RISC 2024 |

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 21:51

An Overview of the Work of the Social Media Observatory

Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 20:43

The Spread of Conspiracy Theories across Fringe Social Media, Mainstream Social Media, and Alternative News Media

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Twitter | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final speaker in this session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the fabulous Annett Heft, whose focus is on patterns and dynamics of conspiracy theories (as part of the Neovex project), and especially on how these spread from the fringes to more mainstream visibility, not least also via social media.

Every digital platform shapes the dissemination of conspiracy theories in different ways, depending on its specific communicative affordances, and of course these platforms are also interconnected and integrated into a multi-platform communicative environment. How do the linguistic styles of conspiracist communication differ across platforms, then, and how …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 20:15

Alignment of Polarised Structures in Trending Topic Discussions in the German Twittersphere

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Taking the German Twitter data as a starting point, then, what are the issues that are being discussed, and what evidence for polarisation is …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 19:45

Conceptualising Digital Intermediaries on Digital Platforms

Produsers and Produsage | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

Public communication flows online are now a dynamic network, which is difficult to model …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 18:48

From an Isolation to a Conflict Paradigm for Understanding Polarisation in Social Media Spaces

Politics | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | FGZ RISC 2024 |

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 00:34

Analysing the Visuals Shared by the Different Sides of a Polarised Conflict

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

The project is interested in the visual content that these groups share online, and in how this content is used to support their narratives. Visual elements have been especially important in climate change debates, both because of the emotional impact of metonymic depictions of climate change and the use of scientific visualisations to describe and forecast climate change and its implications …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 00:07

Silicon Sampling: Using LLMs to Simulate Social Media Conversations

Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Ethan Busby, zooming in from Utah. His focus is especially on the use of Large Language Models in research, and current research focusses especially on the analysis of conversations in social media spaces, and the potential for automated tools to interact with such conversations.

Large Language Models have the potential to scale up such research and interventions, both in real-world and in simulated contexts. He introduces the concept of ‘silicon sampling’, which asks AI systems to assume a particular political persona in order to then simulate engagement in or …

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Snurb — Thursday 25 April 2024 23:42

How Is Scientific Work Referenced in YouTube Videos?

Streaming Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with the wonderful Katrin Weller, who begins by noting that her institution, GESIS, is now also launching DP-REX, the Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research. But her talk is actually about assessing the impact of scientific impact through altmetric scores, with a particular focus on the engagement with scientific content that takes place in YouTube videos. The project uses data from Altmetric.com, who identified links to scientific articles in the descriptions of YouTube videos between 2006 and 2017.

The analysis conducted a manual coding of some …

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