The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2018 session is Mikko Villi, whose interest is in the reserve of news media journalists on Twitter. There are already a number of studies of journalists’ use of the platform; the present paper focusses especially on Finnish news media and journalists, however.

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Gerret von Nordheim and Florian Meissner, whose focus is on the media reporting of digital technology. Such reporting has largely remained dominated by corporate voices, and a previous study has examined how Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung has covered tech issues over time.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

We finish the sessions at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium with our second keynote, by Rebekah Tromble. She begins provocatively by suggesting that we as digital media researchers need to get over ourselves, so this should be interesting.

Many of the current problems for digital media research stem from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in the shutdown of many of the primary sources of social media research data – especially the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of leading platforms. Most applications for API access to Facebook are now denied, for instance; the Instagram platform API was scheduled for shutdown even before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke; and even what is left of the Instagram graph API is now severely restricted. The Twitter search and streaming APIs remain comparatively open, but there are significant and increasing limitations to their functionality, too.

The next paper in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is presented by Felix Münch and Ben Thies, and Cornelius Puschmann and I have also made a small contribution to it. Our project adapted an experimental algorithm to sample a language-based Twitter follower network, and this was necessary because gathering Twitter follower networks at scale has become increasingly difficult.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!