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The final keynote speaker at this iCS Symposium today is the wonderful Katrin Weller, whose focus is on what we do with social media research data: datasets that have been collected by researchers and have already been utilised in scholarly analysis. How are such datasets shared on and archived by these researchers? Sharing here means directly passing these datasets on for use by others, while archiving preserves them for potential future uses. Both practices potentially advance reproducibility and comparability, reduce digital divides in data accessibility between researchers and research groups, and save time and money in data collection; they are …

The final speaker in this iCS Symposium session is Laura Ianelli, whose focus is on understanding the supporters of conspiracy theories. Some such theories may be amusing, but many others are in fact deadly serious and can have significant negative effects. The networks for these theories can be closed epistemological networks with distinctive self-sealing qualities, and who are increasingly suspicious of broader social networks; this makes them difficult to reach for critical scholars.

Drawing on available digital traces in platforms such as Facebook would be one solution to this, but the increasing closure of its APIs is making this more …

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

This project worked in partnership with a political marketing company that provides data-driven political marketing strategies for actors in multiple countries around the world. The company develops its own tools and gathers its own data …

The next iCS Symposium session starts with Fabio Giglietto, presenting his team’s results on the use of social media in the March 2018 Italian election. The project’s aim was to comprehensively examine the role of social media during the election, focussing especially on social media audience engagement with the various media sources available.

The project drew first on data from Twitter, capturing all retweets of Italian parties’ and politicians’ posts and assessing the political leaning of the accounts contributing to this datasets. It then captured the tweets by the top 5,000 contributors to this dataset, to examine which news …

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to …

My own keynote closes the first day of the iCS Symposium “Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation”. Here are the slides:

The second paper in this session at the iCS Symposium is by Daniel Gobbii and Pedro Abelin, whose focus is on the political context in Brazil. Their case study is the assassination of Marielle Franco, a woman who emerged from a poor childhood in the favelas to become elected a councillor in Rio de Janeiro, and was subsequently shot by militia on 14 March 2018.

The ammunition used for her killing was previously linked to a mass killing perpetrated by police and military officers; her murder led to a mass demonstration on the streets of Rio, and subsequently also in …

The next session at this iCS Symposium starts with Irini Katsirea, who continues with our ‘fake news’ theme. There are a great many definitions for this problematic term, and it is usually better to distinguish between several more specific types of mis- or disinformation, and indeed a U.K. House of Commons committee recently recommended abandoning the term altogether.

One submission to the committee defined ‘fake news’ as knowing and consistent publication of predominantly false information in the guise of news, yet what is missing here is an acknowledgment that this is done with the specific intent to mislead; otherwise, openly …

The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces …

The next paper in this iCS Symposium session is by Amelia Acker and Joan Donovan, and focusses on new approaches to gathering metadata from social media platforms without relying on Application Programming Interfaces. Indeed, platform providers are generally unable to predict all of the ways in which users, including researchers, are likely to engage with their platforms, and this leaves loopholes that researchers are able to exploit.

At the present moment, with API access increasingly limited, we clearly need new methods. Part of the issue here is in how the platforms themselves classify their own data through metadata; media manipulation …