Twitter

The next presenter in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Oluwaseun Ajao, who shifts our focus to the question of ‘fake news’ on Twitter. Why is such content circulated on the platform? In part this is because these stories often generate more impact than ‘real’ news stories: this might result in significant shifts in political opinion, financial gains, or other outcomes that are desirable to the operators behind such initiatives.

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.

I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.

The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

The next ICA speaker is Aljawhara Almutarie, whose focus is on citizen journalism via Twitter in Saudi Arabia. Twitter has become an important space for such citizen journalism in the country, in part in response to the economic crisis in the country that followed the 2014 collapse in oil prices.