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The final speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Di Zhu, who explores the effects of personal news customisation on user enjoyment. Customisation here is seen as different from personalisation, which is algorithmically driven: customisation involves active, deliberate user choices, for example by choosing specific topics or indicating their interest in the stories they encounter.

Making choices satisfies a basic human need to be in control of our own lives. But having too many choices can be overwhelming and demotivating, as studies of Website and game customisation options have shown. News customisation could similarly enhance users’ enjoyment of their …

The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.

In Britain, the referendum was also decided strongly along geographic lines (city vs. country, England vs. Scotland) – so is there a geographic element to any echo chamber patterns that may exist here? The present study captured pro- and …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is Dam Hee Kim, whose focus is on what effects exposure to diverse political viewpoints has on partisan views. Such exposure has always been seen as important for a healthy democracy, but this poses two major challenges: audiences do not necessarily actively seek out diverse viewpoints, and such diverse exposure does not necessarily bring about the democratic benefits that theory would expect.

First, audiences tend to expose themselves to news that is in line with their established personal views. Today, they might see a variety of news also via Facebook and other …

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Juho Vesa, whose interest is whether social media activity serves to empower traditionally weaker political groups, such as NGOs. Media success for such groups may simply mean media access, or also a greater involvement in agenda-building through their media presence.

Larger groups can use their digital presences as a platform to feed directly into journalistic processes. Smaller groups, however, might need to generate broader interest on social media first, which may then attract media coverage; this follows a networked media logic and may mean that the status of the group initiating …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 is Moran Yarchi, whose interest is also in the uses of social media in election campaigns. But few recent studies have specifically examined the uses of social media by female politicians: much of the work on the role of women in politics still focusses on other matters, including mainstream media representation.

The present study focusses on Israel, where women make up only 27% of the Members of the Knesset. Media coverage continues to focus on male politicians, and the focus of such coverage is also more on personal matters, while for women considerably …

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Augusto Valeriani, who undertook a study of the popularisation of political communication, examining the social media activities of 51 leaders across 18 Western democracies. Ordinary users may encounter such activities both through directly following these leaders (bond engagement) or through more accidental exposure (bridge engagement); to reach the latter, politicians will need to generate information cascades.

Making politics popular can happen through intimate politics, celebrity politics (appearing as celebrities), or lifestyle politics (appearing as ordinary people). Popularised styles of politics may then engender more bond engagement, while more informative political content could …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

We must therefore distinguish between the personalisation, privatisation, and emotionalisation of politicians’ social media profiles; to what extent are such forms of self-personalisation present, and to what extent do they engage the audience? The present study examined this for the Facebook of the leading party candidates in Germany.

Generic personalisation retains a professional …

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot …

The next speaker in this ‘fake news’ session at ICA 2018 is Tommaso Venturini. He begins by noting how bad he feels about researching ‘fake news’: this is largely because the term is so very poorly defined and so frequently misused.

It is vague: researchers mean very different things when they use the term. It is politically dangerous: political actors are misusing it to attack mainstream news media they disagree with. It is indistinguishable from past concepts of mis- and disinformation: there really is no need to introduce a new term for these forms of content. It is charged with …