The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.
To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …
The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.
Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were …
I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.
Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …
The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is David Wegmann, who returns us to the Danish YouTube data donation study we discussed earlier: his work is to make sense of these data, with a particular focus on extracting features from the YouTube videos encountered by participating users.
Collectively, these users watched some 18 million videos; some 3 million of those are advertisements inserted into organic YouTube videos, though. This leaves some 7 million unique videos, indicating a typical long-tail distribution of user attention to these videos.
Details about what types of videos these data represent are more …
The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felipe Mano, whose focus is on the regulation of digital platform work in the context of the UN’s Agenda 2030. The Agenda provides ethical guidelines for digital platform work; such work might be addressed by formal legal regulation, direct government intervention, soft regulation through agreements between public and private entities, and transnational regulation, and the focus here is on legal regulation.
Felipe’s study explored digital platform work by examining types of work platforms, their materialities, actors and stakeholders, and business models; the latter can be analysed by exploring their financialisation frameworks, data …
The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.
These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by …
The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Valentin Ihßen, whose focus is on the use of metrics in digital political campaigning. The focus here is especially on digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns, which exist in various national settings from democracies to autocracies. Such organisations use the digital media toolkit for online and offline campaigns, and draw centrally on digital data and metrics to determine whether and how they should pursue their campaigns.
At the backstage of these campaigns there are some fairly sophisticated metrics dashboards, therefore – these include opening and click-through rates for campaign mail-outs, for instance, and such …
The first speaker on the second day of the Weizenbaum Conference is Victo Silva, whose focus is on the idea of digital public infrastructure (DPI). How should states intervene in the digital economy, if at all? States might provide alternatives to Big Tech options, and such alternatives could then also adopt open technology standards and support innovation; this might produce public benefits.
Three main systems are widely seen as comprising the core of DPI: digital identity systems, payment and financial infrastructures, and data sharing platforms; however, other platforms (including social media) might also be considered. Such DPI platforms, it is …
The final speaker for this session, and the ACSPRI 2024 conference overall, is María Larrea, and her interest is in the learning journeys of airline cabin crews. María has worked as a flight attendant and crew trainer and manager herself, and questions the extent to which formal training actually prepares cabin crew for their work.
Such training is often in a formal setting in classrooms rather than simulated cabin environments; the airline industry is highly regulated, and cabin crew activities are highly influenced by psychological perspectives, but drawing on sociocultural perspectives that see learning as a situated experience in natural …
