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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 18:18

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill (CCIA 2024)

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |
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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 17:57

And Speaking of Social Media...

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | Streaming Media | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 September 2024 14:51

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

There’s rather a lot going on in Australian policy-making around social media, most of it thoroughly disconnected from evidence, scholarship, and sanity – and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on some of these developments in future posts, too. For the moment, though, here is an update on some ongoing work surrounding the renewed controversies about Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), a thoroughly misshapen piece of legislation which sought to force major digital media platforms to hand over some of their revenue to cross-subsidise struggling commercial news media operators.

The inherent flaws in this approach led to …

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Snurb — Friday 19 July 2024 02:25

Combining Semiotics and Natural Language Processing for the Study of Communicative Phenomena

Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

Kate’s work is interested centrally in the structure of texts, and dependency parsing is a useful tool for this – but such analytical frameworks also substantially complicate the analysis: dependency parsing can show up some 40 or more relationships between words …

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Snurb — Friday 19 July 2024 01:24

How Have Platforms’ Terms of Service Evolved over Time?

Internet Technologies | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

The overall corpus here contains Terms of Use for some 21 platforms, from 1999 to 2024; building this was challenging and required substantial work with the Wayback Machine and …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 20:28

Ten Years of the #auspol Hashtag in Review

Politics | Elections | Government | Social Media | Twitter | SM&S 2024 |

And my own paper on ten years of the #auspol hashtag on Twitter is next at Social Media & Society 2024. Here are the slides:

The Twitter That Was: Reflections on Ten Years of #auspol from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 20:26

Exploring the Unique Social Media Subculture on Tumblr

Produsage Communities | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jessica Crosby, whose focus is on Tumblr. She is interest in online audiencing through Tumblr, especially amongst millennial audiences; platforms such as this enable a performance of the self, but are also complicated by a context collapse between performance and private interactions.

Tumblr is used to think out loud for an anonymous but receptive audience; it has accumulated a cult status amongst creative communities and has accumulated a particularly young, queer, and creative audience. Tumblr presents a continuous stream of content from the Tumblr blogs users follow, and …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 20:08

Nostalgic Anticipation of the Future of Social Media in the Coverage of Emerging Platforms

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 19:02

Understanding Reddit’s Bot Battles

Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Dom Carlon, whose focus is on governance of bots by bots, and inter-bot communication more broadly, on Reddit. Bots are often understood based on how they communicate with humans, and there are often seen as a problem or nuisance, but bots have always also communicated with other bots; this is sometimes by design and sometimes by chance (as bots have unplanned encounters with other bots online). How are bots governing or moderating the behaviour of other bots, then?

Bots can be seen as natural …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 18:39

Explaining the Drivers of Political Homophily in the United States

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | SM&S 2024 |

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

Similarly, there is plenty of evidence of spatial polarisation in the United States, where certain states and counties are regarded as dominated by Republicans or Democrats; this points to a spatial sorting and geographic clustering of political partisans. How might we connect such individual-level homophily and place-level …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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