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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 …

The next session at AoIR 2019 starts with our paper on Twitter activity patterns in the 2019 Australian federal election, and I presented the first part of this so I didn’t blog it, but the slides are below.

My colleague Dan Angus has now taken over, and he presents his insights into the major topics being discussed in the tweet data. These divide into various policy topics that are both supportive and critical of the current government, and discussions about the electoral process; such themes …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is QUT DMRC PhD graduate Dr. Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the automated dissemination of conspiracy theories on Twitter – including suggestions that celebrities like Justin Bieber, industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and royals are actually shape-shifting lizards; that planes spread mind-controlling chemtrails; that the Earth is flat; or that the California wildfires were started by a new energy weapon created by the U.S. government.

Such conspiracy theorists are experts at providing apparently simple explanations for complex phenomena. They also clusters together to support each other’s explanations with self-reinforcing theories that …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Indra Mckie, who shifts our focus to chatbots – which to date have often been found to be somewhat disappointing in their performance. One type of such chatbot are the dialogue systems that are used to complete bookings or make purchases, and speed up customer interaction; another are chat(ter)bots like the famous Eliza that are set to mimic unstructured human conversations.

Indra has been working with student-facing, library, and human resources chatbot projects at the University of Technology Sydney, and one challenge in progressing such projects has also been to assess …

The final day at AoIR 2019 begins for me with a panel on social media bots, and the first speakers are Felix Münch and Ben Thies who present a paper that I have also contributed to; the slides are below. Social bots have become quite prominent in media coverage of social media in recent times, with particular focus on platforms like Twitter, but it is difficult to assess just how prevalent they are on such platforms, partly also because it is difficult to get a sense of the make-up of larger social media populations.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Kaye Hare, who introduces us to the idea of sensorial litter. This builds on the realisation of how embodied experiences affect the ethnographic research process, which also requires a close sensory attunement to the researcher’s own sensorial context.

This is because experiences of embodiment can be intense (and even overly intense, out of control); they create sensorial litter, and in principle that litter can be picked up – as a product of the research – and processed subsequently. But where does such litter go, and where can it then be picked …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

But how do power relationships affect online tie-breaking practices? Are there …