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The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Aaron Willcox, presenting work with the Scanlon Research Institute to explore local government-level civic opportunities. For organisations, such opportunities include hosting events, offering memberships, involving individuals through volunteering, and taking action through advocacy and campaigns.

The project used the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission database, which contains valid information on the activities of some 30,000 charities around the country; it used Web scraping and human coding to identify civic activities, and utilised Large Language Models to directly code the data as well as to emulate the coding process of human …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference is Gia Bao Hoang, whose interest is in the use of LLMs for detecting efficient persuasion in online discourse. Such an understanding of effective persuasion could then be used for productive and prosocial purposes, or alternatively to identify problematic uses of persuasion by bad actors.

For this analysis, Bao is using data from the Change My View subreddit, where users clearly indicate whether the arguments made have actually changed their minds; and the Truth Wins dataset, which stems from human experiments and contains human-labelled data from persuasion and attention games. He used …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sair Buckle, whose interest is in the use of Large Language Models to detect bullying language in organisational contexts. Bullying is of course a major societal problem, including in companies, and presents a psychosocial hazard: there are several proposed approaches to address it, including surveys and interviews and manual linguistic classification (e.g. in federal parliament), which are subjective and manually intensive; pulse surveys and self-labelling questionnaires (e.g. in companies), which are subjective and limited in their data access; and there are technology-first approaches using LLMs and machine learning to detect …

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

The organisation chose Relevance AI as a tool for this – this is a low code AI solution not unlike ChatGPT, but data is hosted in a private environment and none …

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.

From here, it turned into a hybrid online and offline campaign; it was endorsed by far-right celebrities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and …

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …

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 speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kirsty Anderson, whose interest is in how younger and older news audiences use the news differently. Interviews with news users bear this out: for younger users news is whatever pops up on their social media feeds, while older users might regard only fully fact-checked information as news.

News is critical to societies, of course, and journalism has a special status in terms of news. But this is under threat as news is now available anywhere, any time, and also from sources other than conventional journalism. This is also expressed in …

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its …