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The second speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Omar Daoudi, whose interest is in the Saudi government's reactions to YouTube content. This work covers the period of time between 2010 and 2016, after which there were also considerable changes in government policy.

Saudi Arabia's media system is closed to unauthorised companies; the state controls the media, and indeed by proxy also has substantial influence over pan-Arab media companies. This is also in line with the overall structure of the Saudi government itself, where the king continues to exercise nearly absolute power. However, at the same time senior princes in …

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2017 starts with Giovanni Boccia Artieri, whose interest is in the #selfieprotest phenomenon. Overall, online and social media platforms are playing an increasing role in protest movements, of course, and one of the challenges here is to find some of the boundaries of the public sphere that emerges through this, as well as to trace the dynamics of engagement in these spaces.

But such public spaces are not necessarily public spheres in conventional terms; rather, there are also tensions here between the public and the private, and a fluid transition between both, especially in social …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session on 'fake news' is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on the discussion and dissemination of fake medical news on Facebook. In January 2016, the Italian public affairs TV show Presa Diretta covered alternative cancer treatments in a highly critical way, and further discussed these matters on its Facebook page; the present project examined the debate that ensued. This ties to broader concerns about public distrust in conventional medicine, and the online promotion of alternative treatments.

Personal experience is an important argument in such debates, and online audiences draw on such experiences …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Marco Bastos, whose focus is on the Brexit referendum. He notes that a substantial number of bots were active in the Brexit debate on Twitter, yet many of these accounts disappeared immediately after the referendum. But it is also important to distinguish between different bots: there are legitimate bot developers that offer such accounts, while genuine, highly active users are sometimes also misidentified as bots.

Many bots in the referendum have disappeared, then, as have many of the URLs they shared at the time; these can now no longer be …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Kirsten Gollatz, whose focus is on the institutionalisation of the 'fake news' controversy in Germany. The debate on 'fake news' there continues, and the term itself is controversial; it has now entered the German dictionary, but nonetheless remains ill-defined. There is an ongoing renegotiation of the norms, rules, and responsibilities of the various relevant actors in this context.

Germany already has some comparatively strict laws that address public debate on social media platforms: laws have long addressed hate speech, and now also target the dissemination of 'fake news', and platforms like …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on 'fake news' in Denmark. he begins by suggesting that we are now entering a hyper-factual era: digital media are transforming our definition of news, and political leaders have been capitalising on this by creating their own definitions of news. This has also been described as an era of 'post-truth', but at the same time we have rarely talked more about what is 'true' and what is 'false' than we do today.

In Denmark, tabloids have been at the forefront of these developments. One of the …

The next session at AoIR 2017 is a panel on 'fake news', and begins with Giorgio Bertolin, from NATO (!). 'Fake news' is also an issue for NATO as a military alliance, of course, and NATO is about to publish a report on the issue that is called Digital Hydra. The focus is on exploring activities across different platforms, examining the role of blogs, and studying 'fake news' sites.

The term 'fake news' itself remains problematic, however: it has been used for anything from overtly fake and satirical stories to the spread of deliberate mis- and disinformation that promotes …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Elizabeth Losh, whose interest is in the role of devices in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama was seen as associated with a broad range of constructive as well as destructive devices, from personal mobile phones to impersonal drones, while Donald Trump is associated mostly with the tweets sent from his mobile phone. But what about Hillary Clinton?

Clinton's digital practices, and those of her campaign staff, were greater factors in her electoral defeat than her gender, Liz suggests. There were considerable discussions and scandals about her use of personal …

The next speaker at AoIR 2017 is Olga Boichàk, who begins by highlighting the role of social media platforms in structuring specific forms of human sociality. But this also means that automated accounts – specifically, bots – can imitate and affect genuine human interactions in these spaces. What does this mean for online discussions in the context of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, then?

This project draws on the Illuminating 2016 research project that gathered some one billion social media messages, and focussed especially on major retweet events (where a candidate's message is widely retweeted by a substantial number of …

The second presenter in this AoIR 2017 session is Adrian Rauchfleisch, who begins by highlighting the highly combative and complex nature of the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Counterpublics played an important role here, too; new actors – especially on the right – were able to make their voices heard during the campaign, through some more established actors (Fox News, and Trump himself) also claimed not to be part of the mainstream.

At present, in fact, many right-wing movements around the world position themselves as counterpublics, and one of the key defining characteristics may be an exclusion, or at …