Social Media

The first speaker in the post-lunch session at AANZCA 2024 conference is Ian Anderson, who is interested in the emergence of socialist counterpublics in the present context. Such counterpublics are in a conflicted space: they are fundamentally sceptical about social media (and especially Twitter, even pre-Musk) but also acknowledge social media’s importance for message amplification and community connection; for this reason they combine social media work with more conventional activist practices, such as doorknocking.

Social media thus serve as a kind of unavoidable frame for politics, whether they are fetishised as a utopian communicative space or not. The Victorian Socialists …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …

The first paper session I’m attending at the AANZCA 2024 conference is a panel on democracy in crisis, and starts with my QUT colleague Stephen Harrington. His focus is on ‘dark political communication’, as a way of moving past the overemphasis on mis- and disinformation and recognising that such practices are just one part of a much broader range of communicative dysfunctions in contemporary political systems.

This then also incorporates a greater focus on recent changes in political PR: political PR has been a growing focus in the study of politics in recent decades, with attention paid to its arrangements …

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

This analysis focusses on some 2,500 episodes of Brazilian masculinist podcasts across ten streaming platforms. It engaged in an assisted content analysis using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and explored whether this could identify detailed variables in the content. The podcast episodes were transcribed using automated tools, and 52 episodes …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The final presenter in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters, whose focus is on the Russian weaponisation of digital diplomacy in the context of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian propaganda media like RT and have largely been banned in Europe, but Russian embassy and diplomatic accounts continue to operate with impunity on social media platforms (even though they do not have any right to diplomatic immunity here), and this project gathered data on these embassies’ posts from Telegram.

Most of these embassy accounts began posting frequently after the start of the full-scale invasion, and they frequently repost content from a small number of Russian state accounts. Topics in such posts include hard propaganda (disinformation about Ukraine and patriotic material about the war); broader discussions about a multipolar world order and western neocolonialism, as well as the ‘golden billion’ conspiracy theory; and a new Cold War.

Many such embassies are actively targetting countries in the Global South; Marc highlights the exceptional engagement level around the Russian embassy in Bangladesh as an example here, which posted a range of variously Anti-Semitic and anti-American material, highlighted the friendship between Russia and China, and engaged in a variety of typical far-right culture war arguments.

This weaponisation of global diplomacy is playing out on a global scale, and has a memeish cultural dimension. The Kremlin can be understood as an ambient amplifier here.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Richard Rogers, whose interest is in the concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on Facebook. The term was introduced by Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in 2018, and has evolved substantially since then: from a generic definition of groups of pages or people working together to mislead others it was sharpened to a more narrow focus on the spread of ‘fake news’ for strategic purposes.

Richard illustrates this through an analysis (using Fabio Giglietto’s CooRNet tool) of coordinated activity on Facebook, and asks how Facebook’s redefinition of CIB might …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

A definitive answer to this question is beside the point: the more important issue here is that this question was repeated frequently …