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The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jeeyun Sophia Baik, whose interest is in the long-standing allegations of anti-conservative bias that have been made against social media platforms. Such claims have been embraced prominently by Donald Trump and other far-right actors, in particular, and some US politicians have even attempted to ban what they understand as ‘social media censorship’.

The problem is that claims of anti-conservative bias have been proven to be unfounded by a range of studies, and that there is in fact a substantial platforming of conservative and far-right voices by social media …

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Damien Renard, whose interest is in the power dynamics between platform operators and user communities. The focus here is on StackExchange, where moderators went on strike in protest against the platform’s May 2023 policy change to allow AI-generated content.

Moderators saw this as breaking an implicit contract between platform operators and moderators; they were worried about the impact on content quality and concerned that this policy change was implemented without consultation with the platform community. This is an example of digital power struggles on platforms, which …

The post-lunch session at Social Media & Society 2024 is on platform governance, and starts with Paloma Viejo Otero. Her focus is on the question of platform safety, which has become an increasingly important issue for social media platforms. Facebook has long emphasised the free flow of information and the freedom to share and connect, but this was replaced by a new set of core values in November 2019 – support for the free flow of information in particular was replaced with a new safety rhetoric that emphasised a greater role for moderation.

In response to such changes, there is …

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Victoria O’Meara, whose focus is on the anti-vaccine ‘Children’s Health Defense’ group, founded in 2016 and directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until 2013; it is a key driver of health-related mis- and disinformation campaigns in the context COVID-19 and beyond.

CHD was identified as a key disinformation superspreader by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and removed from Facebook and Instagram in August 2022 for repeatedly violating its terms of service on misinformation and conspiracy theories. RFK Jr. was similarly deplatforming, but has been reinstated …

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Michael Chan, whose interest is in cross-national misinformation belief and sharing patterns. Mis- and disinformation is a global pattern, but are the motivations for engaging with such content the same across countries? If not, what does the mean for countermeasures against such problematic information?

Cognitive drivers may be intuitive thinking (a lack of analytical thinking or deliberation), cognitive failures (neglecting source cues or counter-evidence), or illusory truth (familiarity, fluency, and cohesion); socio-affective drivers may be source cues, emotion, and worldviews. This paper focusses on the cognitive …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Hazel Kwon, who continues the COVID-19 mis- and disinformation theme. Such conspiracist claims often focussed on powerful actors (politicians and others), and this represents a reductionist worldview; these claims can have very direct material impacts on communities, for instance when they question the established science and promote vaccine hesitancy.

Some such conspiracy theories focussed directly on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work on vaccination; the present paper examines the superspreaders of such ideas on Twitter during the last three quarters of 2020. Tweets were linked to major …

It’s a suspiciously sunny Wednesday in London, so I must be at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, where I start by chairing a panel on mis-and disinformation. My excellent QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the first presenter, whose paper focusses on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. She starts with conspiracies around the role of Bill and Melinda Gates (and other philanthropists) in global crises – they are often targets of conspiracy theories which claim that they had a role in secret plots to create such crises.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as presenting webs of floating signifiers, enabling a politics …

The final speaker in this final session at IAMCR 2024 is, appropriately enough, outgoing IAMCR President Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in expert imaginings of the future of conflict and communication technologies. He begins by outlining the patterns of conflict in a very broad sense. Such conflict can be agonistic or antagonistic, and towards the antagonistic side there may be increasingly violent grey zone conflicts, armed conflicts, or hybrid conflicts – and the latter then also move beyond the realm of democratically acceptable conflicts.

Media play a critical role in all such conflicts, of course; media and communication technologies are …

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicholas Holm, whose interest is in the role of fun in the public sphere. In political communication, in fact, humour and laughter often appears out of place; in recent times, however, some playful and humorous elements have come to intrude into political discourse. How can we make sense of this?

This diverges very substantially from the staid, rational, serious Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which was always unrealistic and never properly realised. Indeed, the polity is not always especially interested in such boring forms of public debate, and instead indulges …