Social Media

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I presented the next paper, which explored the evidence for polarisation in news recommendations from Google News, building on our Australian Search Experience project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S):

The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Elena Pilipets, whose focus is on pro-Russian propaganda content on TikTok. TikTok establishes publics for imitation and amplification, and this has enabled a new form of ‘ampliganda’ (amplified propaganda) that thrives on affect and attention.

The final AoIR 2024 conference panel that I’m attending today is on ambient amplification, and starts with an introduction by Marloes Annette Geboers and Elena Pilipets, who introduce foregrounding of the background, platforms and Web environments, embodiment and materiality, modulation of attention and affect, and more or less coordinated engagement as they key dimensions of such ambient amplification.

The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.