Streaming Media

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 …

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.

This integrated approach better reflects the …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my great QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, whose focus is on the Australian far-right news channel Sky News Australia, which he characterises here as a populist media channel. Populism is a current buzzword, but is also widely understood as a thin-centred ideology that can attach itself to various political values; it centrally pits ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’, but the term is perhaps most often used – problematically – to specifically describe ‘far-right’ populism.

Media have an ambiguous role in relation to populism: media are themselves criticised for being part …

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 presentation in this AoIR 2024 conference session is by Constantin Paschertz and Christian Schneider, whose focus is on populist German politics on TikTok in the Bavarian state election in 2023. The use of social media in political campaigning is not new, of course, but German parties have tended to be hesitant to use TikTok for this – out of concerns about the Chinese ownership and dubious data practices of the platform.

But some 15% of German online users now also use TikTok for news (and this particularly includes first-time voters), and especially the fascist AfD party has moved …

The next session at this AoIR 2024 conference is on elections, and starts with a paper by Carlos Entrena Serrano, whose focus is on the use of TikTok for political and social issues content. He begins by noting that social media were initially advertised as a space for social connection, but with the move to a video-first social media experience this has shifted considerably towards the algorithmic curation of content experiences for users. Users still have some agency in this, however, and this scan be understood as a process of consumptive curation, where networked individuals navigate pools of data in …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Rob Topinka, whose focus is on conspiracy theories that are promoted by reactionary ideological entrepreneurs like Russell Brand. Their rhetoric doesn’t need to make any positive propositions: all they need to do is point out things that (in their view) have ‘gone too far’, in in doing so position themselves as bold new heroes who speak for ‘the people’; this can be understood as a new and reactionary form of counter-culture.

People like Brand have gradually moved further into this milieu, and are spouting increasingly far-right rhetoric; they also position …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.

What role does the TikTok app and platform play in all of this, in terms of the app infrastructure, affordances, and affect? This project conducted an app walkthrough, engaging with the TikTok app like a first-time user and observing the experience of doing …

The third speaker in this session at ECREA 2024 is Margaux Guyot, whose interest is in the evolution of the dynamics between sound and text in social media news videos, examined here for the Wallonie and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland.

Indeed, is text overtaking sound in news videos? There are four ways of engaging with audiovisual content on smartphones: addressing others, serendipitous exposure to video, opportunistic search, and premeditated viewing, and these provide a framework for the analysis here; this paper focusses on videos posted by seven Walloon and Swiss news outlets in 2020 and 2023, and classified them …