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 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 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.
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:
1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?
The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean …
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and 
