Social Media

Continuing with the round-up of recent activity I began in my last few posts (covering new articles, new conference presentations, new research videos, and my lecture series on Gatewatching and News Curation), here’s an update on a few other writings and presentations for a more general audience.

Facebook News Ban Redux

Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In Australia, the NMBC resulted in Facebook blocking Australian users from accessing or posting any news on its platform for over a week, before a compromise that strongly favoured Facebook was found – and as I write this, the same is happening in Canada. I spoke to Michael about Australia’s long and tortured path towards and through the news ban, and shared our findings on what happened on Facebook during the Australian news ban (in short: live continued as usual, proving Facebook’s point that news matters a lot less to the platform than policy-makers might have thought):

Social Media Campaigning on the Voice Referendum

In other current events, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also begun to track the social media campaigns surrounding Australia’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be held in the final quarter of 2023. We’re still at an early stage of the campaign, of course, but already the PoliDashboard project (which our colleagues at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University have kindly extended to cover Australia) is picking up on the intensified advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and so is our Australian Ad Observatory operated by the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Together with my colleague Dan Angus, I published an overview of our observations to date in The Guardian recently; subsequently, I also appeared on the Centre for Responsible Technology’s Burning Platforms podcast:

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by Mike Schäfer and Mark Eisenegger. Here, I’m returning to my long-standing interest in dragging public sphere theory kicking and screaming into the digital age, by outlining a number of the fundamental building blocks of the network of publics that has become our everyday reality, and identifying some of the empirical approaches we may use to study those building blocks and their interrelationships in situ. Written in late 2022, many of the examples I use to illustrate these approaches are still drawn from waning social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so one of the next challenges for our field will need to be to translate these approaches to new and emerging online platforms – and that will certainly also be an important aspect of my work over the coming years.

Axel Bruns. “From ‘the’ Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Towards an Empirically Founded Model of Contemporary Public Communication Spaces.” Communication Theory, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtad007.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko M. Skoric, whose interest is in incidental exposure to political information on social media. The present study is especially interested in exposure to people of different religions, from the perspective of Pakistani users. Such exposure is also critical to the avoidance of ‘echo chambers’, of course – but the context of such exposure also matters, of course: for instance with respect to the (in)civility of the content that is encountered.

The final paper in this short session at IAMCR 2023 is Sofia P. Caldeira, who is exploring the imaginaries of feminist activism on Instagram. Digital and social media platforms are essential for everyday encounters with feminism, which exists on these platforms side-by-side with interpersonal and entertainment uses. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with a particular emphasis on visual aesthetics and its own cultures of use – what feminist imaginaries does it enable and support?

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping.