Social Media

The next speaker in this fast-paced final AoIR 2022 session is Maximilian Schlüter, who is also interested in disinformative communities. He notes that a specific understanding of disinformation has emerged that does not necessarily capture all forms and formats of disinformation – today, disinformation is far more widespread and mundane than previously imagined.

Maximilian’s focus is particularly on white male supremacist communities, and here on ‘Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity’ (RMEM) memes and how they are circulated and remixed: are we asking the right questions and telling the right stories as we study such forms of disinformation, and does this approach …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

The 2022 Cybersecurity Challenge extended this further, and focussed in part also on anti-feminist disinformation; this employed a similarly limited perspective. NATO is …

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

Notably, there are a fair number of young people of colour involved in these conspiracy theories, well beyond the ‘Fox Mulder’ stereotype of the …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists interpret supposedly ‘hidden knowledge’ and connect it across domains in order to support their worldviews; this develops …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform. Such platforms have been used as a refuge for refugees from mainstream platforms following their deplatforming, and enable them to further foment their extreme views; they have played a role in a range of political debates …

The final day at AoIR 2022 starts with a session on toxic behaviour, and a paper by Marco Bastos and Shawn Walker on the Twitter Compliance API. Twitter has a number of APIs: best known of these are the REST API (access to read and write Twitter data), Search API (to search tweets from the past seven days), and Streaming API (to produce a continuous stream of new tweets matching the search terms). The Search API is somewhat unreliable when searching for past tweets, while the Streaming API requires a permanent, 100% uptime connection to produce gapless information streams.

Finally …