Twitter

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

For instance, does Twitter provide the basis for a public sphere? It is public, interactive, and dynamic, and therefore exhibits some of the basic features of a public sphere; journalists frequently regard it as a representation of the …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Maja Šimunjak, who shifts our focus to the Twitter activities of Donald Trump in the early stages of his presidency, and to the responses these received from foreign leaders.

Trump mentioned some six leaders and 19 countries in the first months of his presidency, and this is considerable greater than the activity of many other national leaders; his mentions are often directed more at America’s (or Trump’s) perceived enemies than acknowledging its friends. Such mentions can then be analysed for their use of conventional diplomatic language (qualifying, hedging, polite, positive, and/or …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

We should therefore look at the interactions between …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters …

The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

What is interesting about Jenna Abrams ‘her’-self is the creation of a distinct persona and mode of self-presentation; this account represents an interpersonal mode of disinformation. This is a form of the authenticity work which is also common to the online persona construction by ordinary users, strategic actors …

The next speaker in this iCS Symposium is Michael Bossetta, who focusses on the specific problems of spearphishing, disinformation, and bot activity on social media platforms. Could these problems be investigated by researchers conducting a controlled, simulated cyberattack themselves?

Michael pursued this especially for the context of Twitter, which seems most conducive to such research. This drew on the Python software SNAP_R, which captures the recent tweets from a defined list of accounts and uses Markov models to generate new messages to these users that to speak to their apparent interests. Michael created a new Twitter account to post …

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …

The next iCS Symposium session starts with Fabio Giglietto, presenting his team’s results on the use of social media in the March 2018 Italian election. The project’s aim was to comprehensively examine the role of social media during the election, focussing especially on social media audience engagement with the various media sources available.

The project drew first on data from Twitter, capturing all retweets of Italian parties’ and politicians’ posts and assessing the political leaning of the accounts contributing to this datasets. It then captured the tweets by the top 5,000 contributors to this dataset, to examine which news …

My own keynote closes the first day of the iCS Symposium “Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation”. Here are the slides: