I arrived late to the final AoIR 2017 session on computational propaganda, and I think it's Samantha Bradshaw speaking at the moment. She's presenting the overall Computational Propaganda project at the University of Oxford, which from secondary source research identified some 23 countries that were known to be using some kind of informational warfare online at this stage.

The recent report from the project identifies social media uses in computational propaganda since 2010, which mainly focus inwardly and target domestic audiences; authoritarian regimes are especially active. Democratic countries are more likely to target external audiences, but sometimes also target specific …

The second keynote at AoIR 2017 is by Marju Lauristin, who is both a professor at the University of Tartu and the rapporteur on e-privacy at the European Parliament, where she also represents Estonia as an MEP; indeed she has been named one of the most influential Estonian women in the world. This week the Parliament voted on new EU privacy regulations which Marju has been instrumental in developing.

Her focus here is on the impact of algorithms on deliberative democracy, and the short summary of the situation is that algorithms will severely affect democracy if the companies that utilise …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Omar Daoudi, whose interest is in the Saudi government's reactions to YouTube content. This work covers the period of time between 2010 and 2016, after which there were also considerable changes in government policy.

Saudi Arabia's media system is closed to unauthorised companies; the state controls the media, and indeed by proxy also has substantial influence over pan-Arab media companies. This is also in line with the overall structure of the Saudi government itself, where the king continues to exercise nearly absolute power. However, at the same time senior princes in …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Kirsten Gollatz, whose focus is on the institutionalisation of the 'fake news' controversy in Germany. The debate on 'fake news' there continues, and the term itself is controversial; it has now entered the German dictionary, but nonetheless remains ill-defined. There is an ongoing renegotiation of the norms, rules, and responsibilities of the various relevant actors in this context.

Germany already has some comparatively strict laws that address public debate on social media platforms: laws have long addressed hate speech, and now also target the dissemination of 'fake news', and platforms like …

The morning session on this second day at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Leighton Andrews, who begins by highlighting the role of Internet intermediaries as gatekeepers for news; over the last year we've also seen the early signs of a regulatory turn that has seen lawmakers take a greater interest in addressing the implications of their role.

One concern here is the emergence of platforms (originally AOL, now Facebook and others) as 'walled gardens' that control information flows and lie outside of EU or U.K. regulations. Further, the algorithms by which these sites operate are largely unknown and outside …

The final keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 today is by Guy Berger, Director of Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO, who asks the perfectly innocent question "Does Journalism Have a Future?" The challenges it now faces include questions about the authority and objectivity of legacy news organisations, social media, 'fake news', political satire, automation, sourcing and expertise, scrutiny and accountability, and journalism education, to name just a few; each one of these is considerable.

Yet another issue for journalists is their personal safety, as journalists are regularly abused and threatened via social media and other channels. There …

The final paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Caroline Fisher, whose focus is on Australian politicians' approaches to bypassing the scrutiny of the parliamentary press gallery. This is based on a set of 87 interviews with key media actors from the Howard era, including the former Prime Minister himself, as well as on an analysis of the social media activities of five Australian political leaders and interviews with their press secretaries.

Politicians have always sought to control the information flows that cover their activities; through social media they have become more easily able to bypass conventional journalistic …

The next paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is by my colleagues Brenda Moon, Ehsan Dehghan, and me, and I'm presenting it, so I won't liveblog it, of course. Below are the slides, though:

The next paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Ariadne Vromen, whose focus is on debates of housing affordability on Facebook. Social media are of course being used for everyday political talk, but the private pages of individuals are very difficult to observe effectively, and for good reason. But the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets serve as a kind of intermediary, semi-public spaces for such talk; here, it is possible to observe engagement, interactions, and sentiment, as well as reactions to media framing of current issues.

Housing affordability is a major political issue in Australia, especially …