Journalism

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …

The next speaker in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session is Ana Sofia Cardenal, who has recently finished a project on pathways to misinformation that built on Web tracking data. The results of this work also inform a new project which constructs simulated environments for online discussions in order to explore how different discursive settings affect the dynamics of such discussions.

The earlier project addressed the substantial problem of mis- and disinformation, across digital and social media environments and beyond. It showed that visits to fringe and problematic information sources are actually fairly rare, even though many people hold at …

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 next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Lion Wedel, who begins by highlighting the definitional uncertainties about news and news actors online. This can lead to a misrepresentation of the news and information uses by particular demographic groups, such as young people.

One way to work around this is to focus on the informativeness of sources, rather than a more narrow definition of what is news; but how can this be assessed for a given source? This project worked with participant donations of data download packages from social media platforms, connected with a representative two-wave panel study of …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Maysa Amer, whose focus is on platform governance especially in Egypt. Platform governance has been variously approached through self-regulation (in the US), through a citizen rights-centric regulation (in the EU), or through state-led regulation (in China); how is it approached in Egypt, however?

Since the Arab Spring, which served as a substantial disruption of established governance models, Egypt has increased its regulation for digital technologies; new media laws and digital protection regulations also addressed mis- and disinformation, but in doing so also created mechanisms for targeting critical civic actors …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Regina Cazzamatta, whose focus is on the disruption of public spheres in Europe and Latin America by regressive ‘alternative’ media. ‘Alternative’ here is a problematic term, as some outlets are alternative in a progressive sense, trying to provide a platform for marginalised voices, while others are much more regressive and illiberal in ideology and spread mis- and disinformation. Here, the focus is on the latter category of outlets.

How do such regressive outlets justify their institutional roles, then? The project focussed on some 65 such sites that had been identified by fact-checkers …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …