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The COVID-19 online edition of the wonderful Social Media & Society conference has just started, and my colleague Tobias Keller and I are presenting our latest research via a YouTube video that has now been released. In our study we examine the average dissemination curves for news articles from mainstream and fringe news sources; this analysis is prompted by the persistent media framing of past research as (supposedly) showing that ‘fake news’ disseminates more quickly than ‘real news’.

Leaving aside such disputed labels, we find no evidence of any systematic differences in dissemination speeds on Twitter: during 2019, for …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

This is not necessarily a purely Australian phenomenon – other news organisations also deliberately publish controversial content in order to pursue user engagement – we might need to rethink the focus …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on inauthentic coordinated link sharing on Facebook in the run-up to the 2018 Italian and 2019 European election in Italy. ‘Coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ is a term used by Facebook itself, especially to justify its periodic mass account take-downs; the term remains poorly defined, however, and Facebook’s own press releases mainly point to a one-minute video that it has published to define the term.

The term marks a shift from content to process (including actors, propaganda, and information cascades), but – surprise! – largely remains unaware …

For the final (wow) session of AoIR 2019 I’m in a session on news automation, which starts with Marijn Martens. He begins by describing algorithms (for instance, news recommender algorithms) as a form of culture, as well as as a form of technical construct – and by highlighting as well how algorithms are being imagined, perceived, and experienced through the mental models that users construct for them.

So, what assumptions do users have about the construction of a new recommender system – what is their personal algorithmic imaginary? Martijn conducted two-stage interviews with users, first as an in-depth interview to …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 panel is Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on the developments of online political communication in Sweden – this covers the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. His focus is especially on the rise of populism in Swedish politics, and the platformisation of messaging in election campaigns.

Populism can be seen as a style of political communication; this may include negative political content and policy and personal attacks (which could also backfire, of course), as well as the targetting of specific elite or minority groups. Platformisation refers to the emergence of hybrid campaigns …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Jakob Linaa Jensen, who focusses on the Danish political environment. He and his colleagues conducted surveys amongst Internet users in four Danish election campaigns (2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019) to examine their experiences with the role of social media in national elections. Denmark has a multi-party system, and Facebook is clearly the leading social media platform here.

Over these campaigns, the use of news and party Websites has increased over time. Social media use peaked in 2015, with 61% of survey respondents using such platforms, yet only 46% in 2019. Such …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the fabulous Jenny Stromer-Galley, who shifts our focus to 2014 and 2018 gubernatorial campaigns in the United States. She begins by noting the significant growth in negative advertising in U.S. elections, and this increase may also have led to a gradual decline in voter turnout as well as a general mistrust of political and democratic institutions.

Research into the uses of social media in political campaigning should aim to generate similar longitudinal datasets, to compare campaigning strategies over multiple cycles. This would also enable us to identify the rhythms of individual …