Blog

The first full day at the ECREA 2024 conference begins for me with a panel on Telegram and politics. The first presenter is Corinna Peil, whose interest is in COVID-19 conspiracy narratives on Telegram. How do the people who disseminate such narratives understand content moderation interventions?

Content moderation is a fundamental service that social media platforms provide, but this also generates accusations of censorship; exactly how content moderation works is also a subject of (sometimes conspiracist) ‘folk theories’ about the power and practices of social media platforms, however. The pandemic heightened this further, as it pushed platforms to implement stronger …

After a brief excursion to Helsinki for a workshop and a guest lecture, I have made my way to Ljubljana for the great biennial European communication conference, ECREA 2024. After the opening ceremony and a pipe organ performance (!) of Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers”, we start now with a keynote by Vesna Leskošek, addressing the conference theme of ‘communication and social (dis)order’.

She begins by introducing the idea of the welfare state, as a concept that may be in decline in the present time. But the welfare state maintains social order, social structures, and social institutions; it was one …

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

Kate’s work is interested centrally in the structure of texts, and dependency parsing is a useful tool for this – but such analytical frameworks also substantially complicate the analysis: dependency parsing can show up some 40 or more relationships between words …

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

The overall corpus here contains Terms of Use for some 21 platforms, from 1999 to 2024; building this was challenging and required substantial work with the Wayback Machine and …

And my own paper on ten years of the #auspol hashtag on Twitter is next at Social Media & Society 2024. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jessica Crosby, whose focus is on Tumblr. She is interest in online audiencing through Tumblr, especially amongst millennial audiences; platforms such as this enable a performance of the self, but are also complicated by a context collapse between performance and private interactions.

Tumblr is used to think out loud for an anonymous but receptive audience; it has accumulated a cult status amongst creative communities and has accumulated a particularly young, queer, and creative audience. Tumblr presents a continuous stream of content from the Tumblr blogs users follow, and …

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 …