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I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do …

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Dom Carlon, whose focus is on governance of bots by bots, and inter-bot communication more broadly, on Reddit. Bots are often understood based on how they communicate with humans, and there are often seen as a problem or nuisance, but bots have always also communicated with other bots; this is sometimes by design and sometimes by chance (as bots have unplanned encounters with other bots online). How are bots governing or moderating the behaviour of other bots, then?

Bots can be seen as natural …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

Similarly, there is plenty of evidence of spatial polarisation in the United States, where certain states and counties are regarded as dominated by Republicans or Democrats; this points to a spatial sorting and geographic clustering of political partisans. How might we connect such individual-level homophily and place-level …

The final day at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference begins with a paper by Wujiong Ren, who begins by highlighting the role of social media in accompanying international conflicts. He suggests that the Russian war against Ukraine is the first to fully combine physical and cyberwarfare.

One tool in this warfare is the tactic of hashtag hijacking, where malicious actors flood a hashtag in order to render it useless for genuine uses – and he says that this could represent a zero-sum calculation where hijackers and genuine users of the hashtag compete for public attention. Such hashtag hijacking …

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 panel is Steven Gamble, who begins by pointing the appropriation of Black American culture in contemporary music; his focus is especially on Ariana Grande as a multiply constructed pop persona who presents a racial ambiguity.

This racially ambiguous representation has been described as ‘blackfishing’, and there is considerable discussion online from both fans and detractors about her race and ethnicity, running even to long post that pretend to forensically retrace her ethnic heritage. Such discussions tend to combine a variety of perspectives on blackfishing in general, on Ariana Grande …

The second speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 panel is Ed Katrak Spencer, whose focus is on the clickbait conspiracism surrounding Britney Spears. There is a continuous refuelling of speculative Spears discourse: music-related online controversy is a continuous rhythm rather than singular event, and online conspiracism is itself becoming a quasi-musical vibe.

Even after the end of Spears’s 13-year conservatorship, several prominent social media users refused to let go of the #FreeBritney conspiracy theory; there are even theories that the real Spears has been replaced by a body double or by AI. But Spears has always been described …

For the final Social Media & Society 2024 session today I’m in a panel on online music cultures, which starts with Jenessa Williams, whose interest is in how fans decide to continue or discontinue their fandom for artists accused of sexual misconduct, especially also in the context of changing music consumption habits. The focus here is on smaller, genre-specific cases rather than widely publicised allegations against superstars.

This identified three main modes of reaction, involving cancellation, confliction, and anti-cancellation: cancellation involved feminist-coded rage, disappointment, and betrayal, and was expressed in strong and absolutist phrasing and explicit actions of condemnation (binning …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

Elite and mass polarisation have similar dynamics, and may be related to each other; mass polarisation is often measured on a simple left-right political scale, but in multiparty systems can be better assessed within a cognitive political network framework, where respondents assess the interrelationships between the various parties and thereby produce …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

As public health threats rise in a given area, does social media activity by and engagement with health agencies follow? Two dynamics could be present here: there may be more activity …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …