I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.
We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:
The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.
Most of these embassy accounts began posting frequently after the start of the full-scale invasion, and they frequently repost content from a small number of Russian state accounts. Topics in such posts include hard propaganda (disinformation about Ukraine and patriotic material about the war); broader discussions about a multipolar world order and western neocolonialism, as well as the ‘golden billion’ conspiracy theory; and a new Cold War.
Many such embassies are actively targetting countries in the Global South; Marc highlights the exceptional engagement level around the Russian embassy in Bangladesh as an example here, which posted a range of variously Anti-Semitic and anti-American material, highlighted the friendship between Russia and China, and engaged in a variety of typical far-right culture war arguments.
This weaponisation of global diplomacy is playing out on a global scale, and has a memeish cultural dimension. The Kremlin can be understood as an ambient amplifier here.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.
Richard illustrates this through an analysis (using Fabio Giglietto’s CooRNet tool) of coordinated activity on Facebook, and asks how Facebook’s redefinition of CIB might …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
A definitive answer to this question is beside the point: the more important issue here is that this question was repeated frequently …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Elena Pilipets, whose focus is on pro-Russian propaganda content on TikTok. TikTok establishes publics for imitation and amplification, and this has enabled a new form of ‘ampliganda’ (amplified propaganda) that thrives on affect and attention.
Russian propaganda, for instance, promotes the ‘Z’ symbol that has been associated with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; there are many TikTok videos that show pro-Russian users make the ‘Z’ gesture with their hands, and thereby act out a particular state of mind. Some of this also intersects with the #RLM (Russian Lives Matter) hashtag …
The final AoIR 2024 conference panel that I’m attending today is on ambient amplification, and starts with an introduction by Marloes Annette Geboers and Elena Pilipets, who introduce foregrounding of the background, platforms and Web environments, embodiment and materiality, modulation of attention and affect, and more or less coordinated engagement as they key dimensions of such ambient amplification. The first presenter, however, is Marcus Bösch, whose interest is in the use of ‘thirst trap’ images: sexualised photos that seek to attract male attention.
Recently, for instance, young female Israeli Defence Force soldiers were posting such images in the context of …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alexis de Coning, whose focus is on the men’s rights movement. Although a great deal more visible in recent years, it emerged to public visibility already in the 1960s and 1970s; but it is likely that early men’s rights ideas go back much further still. Alexis takes a very broad approach here to what defines the men’s rights movement – overall, it exists at the nexus of gender and labour rights and positions men as having greater social-economic and financial status that is exploited by parasitic women.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Ian Glazman-Schillinger, who focusses in on a particular far-right site, the Liberty Bell BBS. This emerged from the Liberty Bell print magazine, which set up the BBS in the early days of the computer age. It thereby predates by some decades the more recent concerns about the substantial technological innovations made by white supremacist movements in the 2010s.
Such recent studies often do not historicise the much longer digital trajectory of white supremacist activism; much more work needs to be done here. The original Liberty Bell newspapers can actually be …
The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.
This project itself goes back hundreds of years. White nationalism is defined by a belief in a unifying racial identity; a perceived connection to land and …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation. Such breakdown might manifest as an absence of communication between opposing sides, and this is difficult to identify empirically if all we have is trace data about active communication processes.
This project focusses on comments, ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions, and shares on Facebook as indicators of affective polarisation on …
