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The Sunday at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a session on digital affordances of social media platforms, and begins with a paper by Christian Baden. Social media are many and diverse, and their affordances keep changing; this still needs to be better understood. Social movements are also many and diverse, which also means that the intersections between social media and social movements can be various, and the particular political intentions and communicative purposes of those movements need to be considered in this.

Social media affordances overall enable visibility, editability, persistence, and association – but what we need to move …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Damiano Spina, who begins by highlighting the current challenges to the global information environment. In the IPIE survey of disinformation experts, politicians, social media platforms, and governments were seen as the most problematic sources of mis- and disinformation.

Computational methods are critical to addressing these problems. They can assist in fact-checking by engaging in claim detection and assessing check-worthiness, supporting evidence retrieval, and enabling veracity and truthfulness classification. But they can also assist in the reporting and dissemination of fact-checks. This does not remove the role of the …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Giada Marino, presenting some of the work of the Vera.ai research project. Responding to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, the project focusses especially on the coordinated communication networks that share such content in order to influence and manipulate social media audiences, and has developed a content-agnostic tool that monitors the activities of identified problematic accounts.

This currently works with CrowdTangle data, and is therefore under threat from the impending closure of the CrowdTangle data. Monitoring lists of problematic accounts derived from Meta alerts, it gathers up to …

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.

The URL Shares dataset covers all URLs shared on Facebook that were shared more than 100 times on the platform, and adds monthly exposure and engagement data for some 48 countries and broad age groups and gender categories …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is the annual Steve Jones lecture, which this year is presented by my QUT colleague Jean Burgess and is on the impact of the newly emerging generative artificial intelligence technologies. This should not be confused with the substantial hype around artificial general intelligence, a technology which always seems to be just around the corner and has yet to actually eventuate.

Rather, this talk is about the more limited generative AI systems that appear to have invaded all sorts of projects, and seem to be universally indicated now by sparkle (✨) icons and …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is by Pengfei Zhao, who is interested in the balance between retributive and restorative reactions to toxic online comments. This is likely also to be influenced by participants awareness of the existence of a broader group of community onlookers who follow exchanges between offenders and those who object to their offences.

The most common online reaction to problematic content is retributive: using offensive language to respond to previous offensive content, and thus potentially kicking of a like-for-like cycle of retribution. Onlookers tend to disapprove of such unproductive and uncivil exchanges …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Chas Monge, who is interested how third parties make sense of online incivility, and is using the path model of blame: is there a norm violation; did an agent cause it; was this intentional; are there justified reasons for this or could it have been prevented; and on the basis of all this, what level of blame should be attributed to them?

But this path model tests instanced behaviours that begin and end in a very discrete point in time; this does not translate so well to broader uncivil behaviours …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Seo Yoon Lee, whose interest is in toxic communicative behaviours, and especially counter-normative opinion expression in online communities. Such community dissidents are often understood as online trolls seeking to introduce community chaos, but this behaviour can be seen as both toxic or constructive: it is toxic if it is done simply to disrupt and aggravate, but constructive if it genuinely seeks to highlight alternative views.

The present study explores this in the context of the polarised issue of climate change. Here, social identity theory points to the existence of in-group …