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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 19:45

Conceptualising Digital Intermediaries on Digital Platforms

Produsers and Produsage | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

Public communication flows online are now a dynamic network, which is difficult to model …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 18:48

From an Isolation to a Conflict Paradigm for Understanding Polarisation in Social Media Spaces

Politics | Polarisation | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | FGZ RISC 2024 |

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

This was true to some degree, and social media did become a discursive engine of our political public sphere – yet the discourse there wasn’t particularly cross-cutting or inclusive …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 00:34

Analysing the Visuals Shared by the Different Sides of a Polarised Conflict

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

The project is interested in the visual content that these groups share online, and in how this content is used to support their narratives. Visual elements have been especially important in climate change debates, both because of the emotional impact of metonymic depictions of climate change and the use of scientific visualisations to describe and forecast climate change and its implications …

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Snurb — Friday 26 April 2024 00:07

Silicon Sampling: Using LLMs to Simulate Social Media Conversations

Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Ethan Busby, zooming in from Utah. His focus is especially on the use of Large Language Models in research, and current research focusses especially on the analysis of conversations in social media spaces, and the potential for automated tools to interact with such conversations.

Large Language Models have the potential to scale up such research and interventions, both in real-world and in simulated contexts. He introduces the concept of ‘silicon sampling’, which asks AI systems to assume a particular political persona in order to then simulate engagement in or …

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Snurb — Thursday 25 April 2024 22:50

Making Sense of the Intersections between Alternative News and Conspiracy Theories

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …

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Snurb — Thursday 25 April 2024 19:42

Polarised Debates about Climate Protests in German News and Social Media

Politics | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | FGZ RISC 2024 |

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

There is a communicative side to polarisation processes, then – this can be understood as discursive polarisation: the divergence of a sphere of consensus into multiple such spheres that represent a disrupted public sphere. This might …

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Snurb — Thursday 25 April 2024 18:02

Destructive Polarisation in the Voice to Parliament Referendum: A Preliminary Assessment

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | FGZ RISC 2024 |

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

Dynamics of Destructive Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media: The Case of the Australian Voice to Parliament …
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Snurb — Monday 22 April 2024 04:20

Are We Heading for Another Facebook News Ban?

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook |

Over the past month, Meta has been in the news again for its troubled relationship with news and news publishers in Australia and elsewhere, and several media outlets have asked me to provide some commentary on recent developments. Two major new announcements from Meta prompted this: first, the news that it would not renew its agreements with some Australian news publishers to voluntarily share a small amount of its advertising revenue with them; and second, the announcement that it would progressively downrank news content on Instagram.

This follows on, of course, from the brief ban of all news content on …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 February 2024 00:43

Patterns in Commenting on the YouTube Videos of Alexey Navalny

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Social Media | Streaming Media | I-POLHYS 2024 |

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 February 2024 00:41

Politicians and Media as Influencers of Social Media Polarisation during the Qatargate Scandal

Politics | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | I-POLHYS 2024 |

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular. There is more interest from economics than media scholars in this, it seems.

Italy has long been perceived as suffering from corruption, and this is frustrating citizens and politicians – but recent corruption indices do document that corruption remains …

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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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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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