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I’m chairing the next session at this AoIR 2024 conference, which is on the intersections (or collision) between journalism and AI. We start with Sangeet Kumar, who notes the long history of complex interactions between digital media platforms and news publishers; news is just a type of content for platforms, while for news producers it is a mission and vocation. There is a substantial amount of traffic coming from digital search and social media platforms to journalistic sites, and therefore a substantial level of dependency.

This has led to some controversial government interventions like the Australian News Media Bargaining Code …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.

What role does the TikTok app and platform play in all of this, in terms of the app infrastructure, affordances, and affect? This project conducted an app walkthrough, engaging with the TikTok app like a first-time user and observing the experience of doing …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Luigi Arminio, whose interest is in the sociolinguistic patterns of polarisation on climate change on Facebook (this approach carries on from the previous presentation). Such patterns may also represent socioeconomic differences: people with lower socioeconomic status tend to be more open to climate change-denialist rhetoric, and such groups also differ from others in their overall communication styles. Can such differences be identified in climate discourse, marking the proponents and opponents of climate activism? Do they influence audience responses?

The project compiled some 10,000 posts from 250 public pro- and anti-climate …

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Luca Rossi, whose interest is in visual communication strategies in climate change debates. Online debate on these topics tends to be highly polarised between those who do and do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change; it is also difficult to discuss in the abstract, so that visual representations become especially important in these debates.

How do specific images feed into the political narrative on climate change, then: are they used to debate objective facts (e.g. through data visualisations), or in a more polarising way to represent group …

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.

Even before the rise of …

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Mette Bengtsson, whose focus is on the relationship between Meta and its network of approved third-party fact-checking organisations. Fact-checking has developed considerably around the world in recent years, and there are several global organisations connecting this network – including the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Meta currently partners with some 90 fact-checking organisations around the world, covering some 60 languages. These can use Meta’s data tools to identify currently circulating claims and select them for assessment; once such assessments have been made, Meta can use them in adjusting its algorithmic ranking of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Paola Palomino-Flores, whose interest is in the intersections of media literacy and misinformation. Misinformation here is defined as false information that is shared unintentionally by users who believe it to be true but have failed to verify its accuracy. This can still disseminate quickly and then cause some very serious harms, of course, confusing people and leading them to poor decision-making.

Paola’s focus is on Peru, and she notes the high reliance of Peruvians on social media for their news; more than 60% of Peruvians get their news from social media …

The third speaker in this session at ECREA 2024 is Margaux Guyot, whose interest is in the evolution of the dynamics between sound and text in social media news videos, examined here for the Wallonie and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland.

Indeed, is text overtaking sound in news videos? There are four ways of engaging with audiovisual content on smartphones: addressing others, serendipitous exposure to video, opportunistic search, and premeditated viewing, and these provide a framework for the analysis here; this paper focusses on videos posted by seven Walloon and Swiss news outlets in 2020 and 2023, and classified them …

My own presentation, on the impact of the 2021 Australian Facebook news ban, was next in this ECREA 2024 session. The slides are available here: