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And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

This required considerable prompt crafting, especially also to ensure that prompts remained within the LLM’s token limits. Key challenges here included the choice of LLM …

The next speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in detecting stances in climate change coverage. This focusses especially on climate change debates in German news media, focussing on climate protests, discussions about speed limits, and discussions about heating and heat pump regulations.

Here stances might be better understood as evaluations related to a given issue or policy, and Large Language Models can be useful tools in assessing this, but this also requires considerable prompt crafting in order to generate consistent results. Computational costs for doing so (especially with complex prompts) …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.

Here, the focus is broadly on stances towards issues, persons, groups, and organisations. There are some tools for doing so, but they mainly focus on English-language content, are designed for specific types of data, and tend …

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

This analysis focusses on some 2,500 episodes of Brazilian masculinist podcasts across ten streaming platforms. It engaged in an assisted content analysis using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and explored whether this could identify detailed variables in the content. The podcast episodes were transcribed using automated tools, and 52 episodes …

The final (!) session at this wonderful AoIR 2024 conference is on content analysis, and starts with Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam. Her interest is especially on questions of agreement and disagreement between content codings; the gold standard here has for a long time been intercoder reliability, but this tends to presume a single ground truth which may not exist in all coding contexts.

The concept of ‘constructs of marginalisation’ might be useful here: marginalised people are underrepresented; existing structural power defines who defines such constructs; they are historically and culturally shaped; and explicit as well as ambiguous and evasive language that discriminates …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.

Most of these embassy accounts began posting frequently after the start of the full-scale invasion, and they frequently repost content from a small number of Russian state accounts. Topics in such posts include hard propaganda (disinformation about Ukraine and patriotic material about the war); broader discussions about a multipolar world order and western neocolonialism, as well as the ‘golden billion’ conspiracy theory; and a new Cold War.

Many such embassies are actively targetting countries in the Global South; Marc highlights the exceptional engagement level around the Russian embassy in Bangladesh as an example here, which posted a range of variously Anti-Semitic and anti-American material, highlighted the friendship between Russia and China, and engaged in a variety of typical far-right culture war arguments.

This weaponisation of global diplomacy is playing out on a global scale, and has a memeish cultural dimension. The Kremlin can be understood as an ambient amplifier here.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

Richard illustrates this through an analysis (using Fabio Giglietto’s CooRNet tool) of coordinated activity on Facebook, and asks how Facebook’s redefinition of CIB might …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

A definitive answer to this question is beside the point: the more important issue here is that this question was repeated frequently …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Elena Pilipets, whose focus is on pro-Russian propaganda content on TikTok. TikTok establishes publics for imitation and amplification, and this has enabled a new form of ‘ampliganda’ (amplified propaganda) that thrives on affect and attention.

Russian propaganda, for instance, promotes the ‘Z’ symbol that has been associated with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; there are many TikTok videos that show pro-Russian users make the ‘Z’ gesture with their hands, and thereby act out a particular state of mind. Some of this also intersects with the #RLM (Russian Lives Matter) hashtag …