The first paper session after the opening keynote at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Daphna Yeshua Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, whose focus is on online support groups for stigmatised communities. They argue that such groups may actually limit these communities’ access to online support. This may be a problem related especially to scalability and searchability.

I’ve arrived at the University of Urbino for the inaugural AoIR Flashpoint Symposium, our new initiative that highlights important current issues in Internet research through one-day, concentrated events. This year’s symposium operates under the title “Under the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Contents.”

The first keynote at the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is by Crystal Abidin, whose focus is on Internet celebrities. There are a number of different types of such celebrities, from well-recognised global celebrities to more niche micro-celebrities who are known mainly to a specific subculture. These people cannot be identified from their engagement metrics alone: they require a different set of research approaches.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

A quick update from on the road: I’m currently in Germany, where I’ve participated in the kick-off meeting for a new EU-funded project on social media analytics in society and crisis communication that is led by Stefan Stieglitz from the University of Duisburg-Essen – more on this as the project develops, no doubt.

But before that meeting I also had the opportunity to participate in a press briefing organised by the Science Media Center in Germany, which makes scholarly research more visible to journalists: this was to discuss the likelihood of disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to the European Union elections in late May 2019. The event included statements from Oliver Zöllner from the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Christian Grimme from the University of Münster, and me, and covered the technical, societal, and ethical dimensions of the ‘fake news’ issue in the present context, followed by Q&A with the journalists present.

Below is the video from the event – all discussion was in German, of course: