Social Media

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

The final paper in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is the result of a collaboration between my QUT colleagues and me and our friends at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, exploring approaches to detecting Twitter bots that promote SoundCloud tracks. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Max Sjöblom, whose focus is on the nexus between social media and eSports. eSports has become increasingly popular in recent times, and refers to forms of sport that are facilitated by electronic systems, where input as well as output are processed by computers. This can take place in a networked environment, but increasingly there are also eSports tournaments being staged in live venues (with additional online streaming).

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Michelle Gorea, whose focus is on the role of visuality in everyday communication among young users. Many more recent social media applications are designed to be accessed via smartphones, and representations of the visual self have therefore become a far more routine activity. Much of the research into these activities are only talking about teens, however, rather than with them.

My next conference for this year is Social Media & Society 2018, where I’m also presenting two papers with different research teams. The first session I’m in starts with Jeff Hemsley, who highlights the need to look at niche social media sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter.

The next presentation in this ICA 2018 session is by Drew Margolin, who highlights the growing use of computational methods in communication, and therefore the need to further scrutinise the methods that are popular here. Truth is revealed and reviewed through a succession of studies.

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.

I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.