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Snurb — Monday 24 June 2024 14:30

Parallel Reinforcing Spirals of Selective Exposure and Defensive Avoidance?

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ICA 2024 |

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

This may involve selective exposure (choosing attitude-consonant media content) as well as defensive avoidance (selectively filtering out attitude-challenging sources and information) – and these are not necessarily inherently connected as a zero-sum game. The present study applies this to the coverage of climate change, where conservative media that challenge the accepted science on climate …

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Snurb — Monday 24 June 2024 12:00

Understanding News Curation Behaviours in Korea

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ICA 2024 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?

Issue publics might come to be because individuals have similar underlying interests; because they are unaware of other issues; or because of a manual filtering process. Such processes will be affected by their attention to issues (the monadic level); their awareness of other issues (the dyadic …

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Snurb — Monday 24 June 2024 10:14

Studying Cross-Platform Alternative News Sharing Practices

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | Streaming Media | ICA 2024 |

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms. To do so, however, also would enable us to better understand the cross-platform network of single-platform publics, and thereby the broader media ecosystem.

Information sharing ecosystems can be defined in various ways; here, they are defined by a …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 14:44

The Closure of the Twitter Academic API and Its Chilling and Dispersal Effect on Twitter Research

Politics | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2024 |

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Megan Brown, whose focus is on the impact of the closure of the Twitter API on public-interest research. The discontinuation of Twitter’s Academic API was announced in February 2023, and remaining APIs are priced exorbitantly and outside the reach of publicly-funded researchers; this has severely affected any further research on the platform.

Twitter research had been growing steadily since its inception, and was researched more than its use amongst ordinary users perhaps warranted. The present study explored the consequences of the API closure through a survey of social media scholars …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 14:41

Political Content in German and Flemish Social Media Influencers’ YouTube Videos

Politics | Social Media | Streaming Media | ICA 2024 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Darian Harff, whose interest is in the political topics covered by social media influencers in Germany and Flanders. Social media influencers run popular social media accounts and have become well-known because of their content specialties, but some occasionally also address political topics. This can be consequential in affecting public opinion especially amongst younger audiences, but is also problematic because they often have no formal political expertise. Such influencers can therefore emerge as opinion leaders who curate political information.

What topics do such influencers cover, then? Are these issues of collective …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 14:40

What News Outlets Benefit the Most from Social Media Logics?

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | Streaming Media | ICA 2024 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

But the social media ecosystem does not replicate the web ecosystem, and some news outlets are making better use of those ecosystems to attract audiences than others. Users’ choices of platforms, and news outlets’ choices in engaging with platforms, both affect the formation of platform used …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 14:38

Posting Styles of and Engagement with US Politicians’ Content on TikTok

Politics | Social Media | Streaming Media | ICA 2024 |

The next session of the ICA 2024 conference that I’m in starts with Christian Pipal, whose interest is in political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. He begins by noting the use of TikTok by the Austrian presidential candidate (and subsequently president) in Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, who both announced his candidacy there and posted the requisite dancing videos.

TikTok may be especially attractive to political candidates because of its younger audience profile, but is this dancing or talking politics? Candidates have explored some very different communicative styles that seem to work for them on this platform: comedic, documentary …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 13:06

Reasons for News-Sharing Avoidance amongst Canadian Social Media Users

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2024 |

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ori Tenenboim, whose interest is in why news users limit their public expression online. This might be driven by perceptions of the visibility of their news engagement, and of the consequences that such visibility may have.

News engagement plays a crucial role in democratic life, and plays a role in what people see and engage with; if users self-censor such engagement then this also affects what other people see in their digital media spaces. Non-engagement may also relate to relationship management, and be affected by users’ privacy calculus about their …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 13:02

Experimenting with Choice Architectures to Enhance News Diversification

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ICA 2024 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Nicolas Mattis, whose interest is in news diversification. This builds on notions of democratically (rather than merely economically) motivated news recommender design, the purported links between news diversity and democratically desirable effects, and emerging experiments with various news diversification metrics.

Any kind of digital news environment can be thought of as a choice architecture: they filter, rank, and present news stories to their user. News diversification facilitates engagement with diverse news, and seeks to facilitate normatively desirable outcomes; this involves the adjustment of such choice architectures. Democratic theory can provide …

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Snurb — Sunday 23 June 2024 13:01

Identity Groups of News-Sharers on Twitter in the Netherlands

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2024 |

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Iris Baas, whose interest is in the self-identity of Dutch Twitter users who share the news. Twitter is (even now, following its enshittification) a key platform especially for news consumption in the Netherlands, and who is sharing news on the platform is therefore centrally important. Are there district groups of such users, then – and what news do they share?

This project worked with the Twitter bios of such news-sharing users to determine patterns in their identities; it drew on some 400,000 tweets from 2021 (that were still online, from …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

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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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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