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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:

I am presenting our research on the in the Australian Facebook news ban in the post-lunch session at ECREA 2024 this Friday, but we start with a paper by Visa Noronen which examines news organisations’ attempts to understand their audiences in the current media context. This is important for determining editorial direction, and the present study examines such processes for the Nordic countries.

There has been a significant shift towards online news media use in these countries, and audiences are even often prepared to pay for online news subscriptions. Visa interviewed some 16 staff from news organisations that are not …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is João Gonçalves, whose interest is in polarisation in the content recommended by YouTube in the Netherlands. This focusses especially on affective polarisation, on labelling of out-groups as extremist, and on a lack of discursive crossover between polarised opponents.

Past research on polarisation has shown a substantial role for non-news Websites; investigating YouTube recommendations is therefore especially important. A key distinction introduced in the present study is between content recommendations around established and non-established parties; additionally, the study also explored content recommendations specifically around right-wing parties.

The project selected five seed videos …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Remzie Shahini-Hoxhaj, whose interest is in visual affective polarisation on Instagram, focussing on political parties that promote extreme or radical right-wing views. Social media algorithms might in fact actively promote and amplify such content, but fostering in-group favouritism and out-group hostility.

This study examined the distinct visual framing strategies of far-right political parties in Europe. Such parties tend to emphasise their own distinct identities; use euphoric language for in-group identification and dysphoric language for out-groups; and include nationalist and historical symbols to appeal to their audiences. The study focussed on France …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Petro Tolochko, whose focus is on affective polarisation in climate activism visuals. Such content can be highly affective in climate activist communication, spark audience reactions, and spread online to promote the emergence of like-minded or opposing groups. The analysis here might include aspects of structural polarisation (using network analysis) and reactionary polarisation (using communication analysis).

An initial question might thus be which types of images lead to increased polarisation online; more recently, however, with the shift from Xitter to TikTok the role of videos in such activist communication has grown. Polarisation …