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 …

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.

Information on such follower networks would open up significant new avenues for investigation that cannot be answered by examining actual interactions (via @mentions and retweets) alone. We did some such work in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre by mapping follower …

Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.

We focus here on Australia, Germany, and the …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …