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The post-lunch session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, who are interested in invisibilities in social media data. For instance, studying protest movements through social media means studying only what is visible about these movements in specific social media platforms – the data must exist in the various technological layers of these platforms in the first place, and those layers significantly constrict what data are available to the researcher. Additionally, such data must also be perceived as meaningful; this requires a shared understanding in the scholarly community that such data can be used …

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Gabriele de Seta, whose focus is on connective practices and selective visibility on Chinese social media platforms. Guided by his Chinese social media friends, Gabriele has tracked social media practices through MySpace and its Chinese equivalent Douban, via early messenger app QQ and the microblog Sina Weibo, to the latest messaging app WeChat.

Such platforms show a range of Chinese social media practices, and perhaps display different conceptualisations of sociality. These have been explained with reference to different understandings of individuality and collectivity in China; to …

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

Theodora used this event as a starting-point for an ethnographic exploration both of the Camp Grounded experience itself and of the participants’ technology usage practices back in the everyday world. After the Camp Grounded experience, there was a flurry of Facebook friending between participants even in spite of the ‘no real names’ policy, which involved …

The next speakers in this session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti, whose focus is on the use of the Telegram platform for the distribution of nonconsensual sexual imagery (including but not limited to revenge porn). The term they use to describe this is image-based sexual abuse, and it arises to some extent from sexting as a new digital practice.

Victims of such image distribution tend to be 90% female, and more than half of the victims have thought of suicide as a result. More generally, for context, in Italy some 20% of all …

The first paper session after the opening keynote at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Daphna Yeshua Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, whose focus is on online support groups for stigmatised communities. They argue that such groups may actually limit these communities’ access to online support. This may be a problem related especially to scalability and searchability.

The project studied groups supporting anorexics, people in treatment for infertility, bereaved parents, and Israeli army veterans with PTSD, across a variety of platforms. It explored how media affordances determine the online boundary work of such online communities, by undertaking a …

I’ve arrived at the University of Urbino for the inaugural AoIR Flashpoint Symposium, our new initiative that highlights important current issues in Internet research through one-day, concentrated events. This year’s symposium operates under the title “Under the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Contents.”

The first keynote at the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is by Crystal Abidin, whose focus is on Internet celebrities. There are a number of different types of such celebrities, from well-recognised global celebrities to more niche micro-celebrities who are known mainly to a specific subculture. These people cannot be identified from their engagement metrics alone …

The final speaker at this ECREA 2018 session is my QUT colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals, who shifts our focus to the vexing question of ‘fake news’. However we define such content, it appears to have had a considerable effect on recent events, and some of the most shared stories on Facebook in recent years have been revealed as mis- or disinformation.

There are also a number of dedicated Websites that have been set up to peddle ‘fake news’, and these are often immensely active at generating and disseminating new content. Such sites are also relevant to our study of Journalism …