The next speaker in this ICA session is Ulrika Hedman, who shifts our focus to journalistic self-presentation on Twitter, and especially to the extent to which they provide personal and private information in their social media profiles.

I’m on one of my rare visits to ICA, and at a journalism session that starts with my colleague Folker Hanusch. He points out the considerable offline homophily between journalists - they hang out and interact with each other, and this may also translate to an online context. Some of this also intersects with news organisations, news beats, gender, and other identity traits, however – and on specific platforms, of course, homophily may also result in different patterns for different forms of interaction (e.g.

For the past few years I have published regular monthly updates of the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) at The Conversation and at Mapping Online Publics. As that partnership has now come to an end and the writing of regular updates had become somewhat onerous, we’ve developed a new approach to sharing the trends in how content from Australian news sites is being shared on Twitter.

From now on, ATNIX is published through a live, interactive dashboard which shows day-to-day trends and lists the most shared URLs for any given timeframe (click ‘full screen’ to enlarge):

I’ll continue to publish ATNIX updates on major trends and developments from time to time, but this dashboard provides a much faster way to make these live trends available. (As a next step in the process, I also hope to automate the @_ATNIX_ Twitter account so that it highlights major news articles as they are trending.)

A few weeks ago I visited Israel to present a keynote at the inaugural Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers. The keynote draws on my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, and focusses especially on the news industry’s responses to the growing role that gatewatching and newssharing via social media play in the dissemination of news and related journalistic content. The presentation slides are below.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past industry responses to just about any new media form and format, seen most recently for example in the ‘blog wars’ of the 2000s –, journalists and news outlets have now gradually and often grudgingly accepted social media as tools of the trade, and as spaces where news producers and news users come together in new and unforeseen configurations. The question now is whether – as with blogs – the journalism industry will be able to normalise and thus tame this new phenomenon, or whether this time around it is journalism and journalists that will be normalised into social media environments.

My sincere thanks for the entire team at Haifa University for the opportunity to present this keynote at the Symposium, and especially to Daphne Raban for her exceptional hospitality – and many thanks also to Nik John, Karine Nahon, and everyone else whom I caught up with along the way.

Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

I published a preview of some of the study’s key findings in The Conversation in May 2017. Meanwhile, my paper at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2017 built on this new Twittersphere map to test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in Australian Twitter – and found little evidence to support the thesis:

Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:

What are the major challenges in Internet research?

The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even two years ago as they are now. This necessarily means that research methods, approaches, frameworks, and concepts must change with them, and that the toolkits we used to understand a particular phenomenon a few years ago may no longer produce meaningful results today. But at the same time we must beware a sense of ahistoricity: 'fake news', for example, does have precedents that reach back to way before the digital age, and we can certainly still learn a lot from the research that studied propaganda and misinformation in past decades and centuries.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Mark Owen Jones, whose focus is on social media propaganda in Persian Gulf states. Overall, there is still a considerable lack of research into social media propaganda in Arabic; in Gulf states, there is a long history of 'fake news' in social media, and hate speech towards particular groups, ethnicities, and countries is not uncommon. Hate speech may be operationalised by ruling autocrats as a tool to divide and rule the population; different religious groups are allowed to attack each other, to keep them from uniting and toppling the government.

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2017 starts with Giovanni Boccia Artieri, whose interest is in the #selfieprotest phenomenon. Overall, online and social media platforms are playing an increasing role in protest movements, of course, and one of the challenges here is to find some of the boundaries of the public sphere that emerges through this, as well as to trace the dynamics of engagement in these spaces.