Internet Technologies

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

This analysis focusses on some 2,500 episodes of Brazilian masculinist podcasts across ten streaming platforms. It engaged in an assisted content analysis using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and explored whether this could identify detailed variables in the content. The podcast episodes were transcribed using automated tools, and 52 episodes …

The final (!) session at this wonderful AoIR 2024 conference is on content analysis, and starts with Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam. Her interest is especially on questions of agreement and disagreement between content codings; the gold standard here has for a long time been intercoder reliability, but this tends to presume a single ground truth which may not exist in all coding contexts.

The concept of ‘constructs of marginalisation’ might be useful here: marginalised people are underrepresented; existing structural power defines who defines such constructs; they are historically and culturally shaped; and explicit as well as ambiguous and evasive language that discriminates …

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:

I …

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.

This is in …

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 …

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however …

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.

Even before the rise of …

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of …

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

The overall corpus here contains Terms of Use for some 21 platforms, from 1999 to 2024; building this was challenging and required substantial work with the Wayback Machine and …