Twitter

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session are João Carlos Magalhães and Emilie de Keulenaar, who begins by outlining the recent history of platform content moderation – from the relatively minimalist approach of the 2000s to early 2010s, influenced by a maximalist and very American understanding of free speech and executed mainly through manual means, to the more interventionist moderation since the mid-2010s, recognising the multiple harms of unlimited free speech, building on a more European and international human rights framework, and utilising much more automated means of moderation.

Content moderation is among the most consequential and controversial systems …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The CPI was formed by the federal senate, and broadcast on TV, symbolically replacing Big Brother Brazil …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Elizabeth Poole, whose interest is in counter-narratives against Islamophobia and their potential for mediated activism. This incorporates a computational analysis of discussions on Twitter related to Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and COVID-19, as well as qualitative and network analysis of these datasets.

The counter-narratives against Islamophobia in these tweets might be understood as mediated solidarity, and in he Brexit dataset there was considerable evidence of such support for Muslims, yet this did not necessarily result in sustained supporting discussions in follow-up tweets; this might be understood as a form of …

Just made it in time to the next session at AoIR 2023, which starts with a paper by Yiran Duan on deleted tweets. The focus here is on deleted tweets in the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag during three key periods (including Black History Month in 2020 and 2021 and a police brutality trial in 2021). Some 37% of these have become unavailable in the last couple of years. This is comparable to the 33% of deleted Brexit tweets (but that deletion rate occurred in four years), and much more than 19% generic tweets deleted in four years that other studies have …

The second paper in this AoIR 2023 session is by Marco Bastos and Raquel Recuero, whose focus is on the 8 January 2022 insurrection in Brazil, after the election loss of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. They describe this insurrection as a form of connective action: a framework that has largely been applied to pro-social actions like Occupy or the Indignados, but can also be used to analyse anti-democratic actions. The present paper examines the framing devices used by populist politicians to inflame their grassroots activists by distributing disinformation and conspiracy narratives, to be backed up by the insurrectionist leadership.

This …

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States. This focusses especially on the role of Gab, Parler, and Rumble, and other alt-tech Websites; it builds on an influencer dataset containing Trumpist influencers; an NYU dataset of Parler posts; and a Twitter dataset of tweets by 13 people who objected to the certification of the 2020 election results, which includes the deleted tweets …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The next presentation in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is by Laura Jacobs, who begins by outlining the function of political in- and out-group identification and its links to polarisation and conflict in society. Political parties make use of in- and out-group appeals in their messaging, and may also draw on populism in constructing ‘us vs. them’ oppositions.

Populism is a thin-centred ideology that positions the ‘pure’ people against the ‘corrupt’ elites; it might connect with a host ideology (e.g. socialism on the left or nativism on the right). This project, then, explores how left- and right-wing parties …