The final Web Science 2016 keynote for today is by Daniel Olmedilla, whose work at Facebook is to police the ads being posted on the site. Ads are the only part of Facebook where inherently unsolicited content is pushed to users, so the quality of those ads is crucial – users will want relevant and engaging content, while advertisers need to see a return on investment. Facebook itself must ensure that its business remains scalable and sustainable.

Key problem categories are legally prohibited content (e.g. ads for illegal drugs); shocking and scary content; sexually suggestive material; violent and confronting content …

Finally for this session at Web Science 2016 we move to Sebastian Stommel, who begins by considering what we mean by Web science in the first place. He suggests that 'big data' serve as a macroscope: a new way of looking at things at scale, and an opportunity to create generative models to explain digital traces.

The study applies this philosophy to the analysis of YouTube videos, which have a defined posting date and properties such as the number of views (indicating attention) and shares (indicating word of mouth). A generative model to explain such metrics over time could be …

The second session on this final day of AoIR 2015 starts with Camille Yale, whose focus is on Netflix. Netflix represents a rearticulation of the commercial media system, rather than a revolution: it has an intense commodity orientation, global ambitions, and oligopolistic practices; it claims for itself that it is democratising entertainment, however.

Such language is driven largely by its Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. Under him, Netflix has defined its own version of media commercialism, but operates much like a regular media conglomerate: it engages with other streaming companies, commodities audience labour, and replaces overt advertising with covert 'commodity …

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2015 is a panel on social media and elections that my colleague Tim Highfield and I are contributing to, but we begin with the excellent Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on recent Swedish elections. Sweden traditionally has a high level of election participation and substantial Internet and social media access, and social media have become increasingly visible in election campaigns, unsurprisingly this has increased over time.

The project followed the election-related hashtags #val2010 and #val2014, and there has been a substantial shift from making undirected statements on Twitter to using retweets to disseminate other …

The second speaker on this AoIR 2015 session is QUT DMRC PhD researcher Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the challenges associated with accessing data from popular Chinese social media platform Weibo. Weibo, meaning 'micro-blog' in Chinese, is a Chinese take on social media services such as Twitter. Sina Weibo is now the most successful of such services in China, with several hundred million users now present on the site.

There is a substantial volume of research now addressing Weibo, but inside of China much of this work still comes only from computer science fields, while …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Michael Humphrey, whose interest is in life stories in digital spaces. Today's talk is focussed on the idea of white privilege, however: this can also be understood through the language we use, which colours how we see the world around us. We look at life through many filters, and tell our story through these filters; some of us take an agentic approach to telling our stories (we are at the centre), while others take a more communal approach (we are part of a group).

Some of this can also be seen …

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Stefania Milan, who begins by noting the social media response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, using Ushahidi Maps as a key tool for mapping the local situation. This is a positive example of how civil society can put big data to good use: what forms of massive data collection are possible here, and how can they be used for good?

There has been an industrial revolution of data, but citizens face a paradox, as moral codes are not yet aligned with social practices. Big data may mean big control, but also more opportunities …

I'm spending the next couple of days in Sydney at the Australia-New Zealand Workshop on Campaign Management and Political Marketing, where I'm presenting a paper on the use of Twitter during the 2013 Australian federal election tomorrow. But we start today with an introduction by John Keane, who is reflecting on the history of elections during the post-war period.

He suggests that there are a number of big trends in this period. First, the electoral revolution: a huge increase in the number of countries which practice elections. Second, even despotic regimes use elections to legitimise themselves. Third, elections have …