Social Media

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication:

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s Saturday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’ve arrived a little too late to see the start of the session on online counterpublics, where Kilian Bühling is already in the middle of his presentation on German counterpublics on Telegram in the context of COVID-19.

The final ECREA 2022 session for today starts with Soyeon Jin, whose focus is on the European immigration debate. She notes that Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration have improved over the years, yet there also seems to be an increasing amount of controversial debate around; what is going on here?

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

The third speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Delia Dumitrica, whose focus is on political humour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her project investigated the representation of politicians in such humour as an expression of trust in politics, across Estonia, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Romania, working with data from digital media during the March to July 2020 period.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Qinfeng Zhu, whose focus is in political talk in WhatsApp groups. This refers not to formal political deliberation, but to everyday political conversations in third spaces online: it is informal, spontaneous, sociable, and outside the realm of formal political discussion.

The final paper in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, and explores the sharing of mis- and disinformation on Facebook as part of our current ARC Discovery project. Our objectives are to identify and categorise the Facebook spaces that are sharing such problematic content, and the themes that they address in their sharing. This might also identify the interconnections and overlaps between such themes and topics, and the way that such connections change over time, especially with the impact of COVID-19 and other major disruptive events.

Here are the slides for this presentation, and my liveblog of Dan’s presentation follows below: