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The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

What is interesting about Jenna Abrams ‘her’-self is the creation of a distinct persona and mode of self-presentation; this account represents an interpersonal mode of disinformation. This is a form of the authenticity work which is also common to the online persona construction by ordinary users, strategic actors …

The next speaker in this iCS Symposium is Michael Bossetta, who focusses on the specific problems of spearphishing, disinformation, and bot activity on social media platforms. Could these problems be investigated by researchers conducting a controlled, simulated cyberattack themselves?

Michael pursued this especially for the context of Twitter, which seems most conducive to such research. This drew on the Python software SNAP_R, which captures the recent tweets from a defined list of accounts and uses Markov models to generate new messages to these users that to speak to their apparent interests. Michael created a new Twitter account to post …

The final iCS Symposium session continues the bot theme with a presentation by Pascal Jürgens. Pascal begins by outlining our current dilemma: threats of communicative manipulation via social media are rising, yet our access to the platform data we need to understand these activities is declining. But we may be able to address this dilemma by employing new and different methodologies.

Interestingly, in Germany there are now moves to create a law that requires bots to be labelled – yet this is unlikely to be effective unless there can be a clear definition of bots in the first place, and …

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …

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: