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AANZCA 2024

Australia Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association conference, 25-27 Nov. 2024

Snurb — Monday 23 December 2024 16:01

A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ACSPRI 2024 | AoIR 2024 | ECREA 2024 | ICA 2023 |

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

 

Polarisation, Destructive

…

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 16:03

Mapping Network Actions and Interactions of Fan and Anti-Fan Subreddit Responses to Taylor Swift at Peak Saturation (AANZCA 2024)

Polarisation | Politics | AANZCA 2024 | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Produsage Communities | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Practice Mapping | Music |
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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 15:40

Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum (AANZCA 2024)

Elections | Government | Polarisation | Politics | AANZCA 2024 | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Industrial Journalism | Journalism | Practice Mapping |
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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 15:32

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (AANZCA 2024)

Politics | Government | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2024 |
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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 11:56

The Meme Logics of Pro-White Racism Campaigns

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Twitter | AANZCA 2024 |

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.

From here, it turned into a hybrid online and offline campaign; it was endorsed by far-right celebrities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 11:55

‘Chinese Scare’ Hoaxes in Indonesian Presidential Elections

Politics | Elections | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 11:53

‘Positive Energy’ in Chinese Social Media Coverage of US Politics

Politics | Government | Social Media | Streaming Media | AANZCA 2024 |

I’m chairing the next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference, which is on disinformation and trolling. We start with Hanyu Zhang, with a paper on the Donald Trump assassination attempt and its discussion on the Chinese platform Douyin. In China, there has been a strong focus to ‘positive energy’ on social media, promoting core ideological values and nationalist narratives. This has also been applied to discussions of Donald Trump, where responding narratives highlighted both the challenges to China and the country’s resilience in the face of such challenges.

Douyin, whose international spinoff is TikTok, has been a crucial space for …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:52

For Different Generations, What Even Is News?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kirsty Anderson, whose interest is in how younger and older news audiences use the news differently. Interviews with news users bear this out: for younger users news is whatever pops up on their social media feeds, while older users might regard only fully fact-checked information as news.

News is critical to societies, of course, and journalism has a special status in terms of news. But this is under threat as news is now available anywhere, any time, and also from sources other than conventional journalism. This is also expressed in …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:51

Distinguishing Political from General News Avoidance

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:49

Source and Engagement Diversity for Australian News on Facebook

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.

This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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