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The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Juho Vesa, whose interest is whether social media activity serves to empower traditionally weaker political groups, such as NGOs. Media success for such groups may simply mean media access, or also a greater involvement in agenda-building through their media presence.

Larger groups can use their digital presences as a platform to feed directly into journalistic processes. Smaller groups, however, might need to generate broader interest on social media first, which may then attract media coverage; this follows a networked media logic and may mean that the status of the group initiating …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 is Moran Yarchi, whose interest is also in the uses of social media in election campaigns. But few recent studies have specifically examined the uses of social media by female politicians: much of the work on the role of women in politics still focusses on other matters, including mainstream media representation.

The present study focusses on Israel, where women make up only 27% of the Members of the Knesset. Media coverage continues to focus on male politicians, and the focus of such coverage is also more on personal matters, while for women considerably …

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Augusto Valeriani, who undertook a study of the popularisation of political communication, examining the social media activities of 51 leaders across 18 Western democracies. Ordinary users may encounter such activities both through directly following these leaders (bond engagement) or through more accidental exposure (bridge engagement); to reach the latter, politicians will need to generate information cascades.

Making politics popular can happen through intimate politics, celebrity politics (appearing as celebrities), or lifestyle politics (appearing as ordinary people). Popularised styles of politics may then engender more bond engagement, while more informative political content could …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

We must therefore distinguish between the personalisation, privatisation, and emotionalisation of politicians’ social media profiles; to what extent are such forms of self-personalisation present, and to what extent do they engage the audience? The present study examined this for the Facebook of the leading party candidates in Germany.

Generic personalisation retains a professional …

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot …

The next speaker in this ‘fake news’ session at ICA 2018 is Tommaso Venturini. He begins by noting how bad he feels about researching ‘fake news’: this is largely because the term is so very poorly defined and so frequently misused.

It is vague: researchers mean very different things when they use the term. It is politically dangerous: political actors are misusing it to attack mainstream news media they disagree with. It is indistinguishable from past concepts of mis- and disinformation: there really is no need to introduce a new term for these forms of content. It is charged with …

Next up in this ICA 2018 session is Harry L. Simón Salazar, who continues the ‘fake news’ discussion. He notes the longer history of this topic, especially in Latin American countries such as Venezuela. Hugo Chavez supporters suggested that an attempted coup against him was driven by ‘fake news’ stories circulating through the mainstream media, for example, and Latin American media have a long history in such political propaganda.

This can be linked to longer-term trends of mediatisation across many societies: mediatisation is a variety of ways in which possible orderings of the social by media are further transformed and …

I’m not seeing quite as many ICA 2018 sessions as I might like, because of other meetings, but this Sunday morning I’m in a session on ‘fake news’, whatever we mean by that term. Mo Jang is starting us off. He begins by noting that the knowledge production and publication system has diversified with the increasing role of online publication, and this has undermined gatekeeping processes. This has also led to the increasing spread of unverified information, rumours, hoaxes, and other forms of ‘fake news’.

How may this be combatted, then? Literacy is one approach; enhanced algorithms is another; and …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Lukasz Szulc, who shifts our attention to our digital profiles. Profile making is now ubiquitous in digital culture, especially of course in social networking sites and with the continuing move towards a platformisation of the Internet. Through our increased use of mobile devices they have also become more pervasive.

Profiles are how we write ourselves into digital being: they enable and suggest different ways of presenting ourselves, and foreclose others; and they are deeply enmeshed with the architectures, design, and governance of social media. Through this, social media platforms build certain …