Social Media

Next up at IAMCR 2023 are Aleix Martí and Roger Cuartielles, whose focus is on the circulation of information in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. Legacy media as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played key roles in this infodemic. Social media in particular played a disintermediating role, enabling the further spread of mis- and disinformation.

The present project sought to explore the information consumption habits of Spanish news users, including the role of social media, the perception of disinformation, and the perception of official information channels. It approached this through a survey of some 1,000 …

The final presenter in this IAMCR 2023 session is Junjun Yu, whose focus is on information cocoons on Sina Weibo. Such cocoons are theorised as close-off spaces where information circulates in an ideologically and informationally homogeneous environment, potentially facilitated by the algorithms and affordances of social media platforms.

Such information cocoons could be identified based on the homogeneity of their selection, their content, or their participants; the present study focusses on the content, in the context of Sina Weibo. It examines the degree of content homogeneity for each user; the posts by a user on the platform; the top information …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.

Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is by Livia Gardía-Faroldi, who presents a comparative analysis of disinformation on social media across the UK, France, and Spain. Such a comparative study is necessary given the very different political and media environments across these countries. Do the audiences in these countries differ in their interest and trust in the news; their concern about fake news; and their use of social media for informational purposes? How are these attitudes associated with one another, and does this differ across these countries? The project explored these questions through a questionnaire.

Key findings are …

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is An Nguyen, with a focus on pandemic news avoidance on social media in Vietnam. A key aspect of this research project, therefore, is its focus on a non-democratic society: pandemic news avoidance has been studied in some detail already for western democracies and their saturated media environments, but the focus on Vietnam is new. How does news avoidance work here?

The project conducted some 21 face-to-face interviews with Vietnamese news users, with a focus on social news use and avoidance, and from these interviews developed a broader questionnaire which was promoted …

The final session on this first full day of IAMCR 2023 is on how audiences consume (or perhaps engage with) disinformation, and the first presenter is Hillel Nossek, with a focus on news consumption by Jewish youth in Israel. He describes this group as ‘newsers’: new news consumers. What characterises this group, then?

The study built on a representative nationwide survey of 673 young people of age 15-18 (i.e. not quite of voting age just yet) at state and state-religious schools; questionnaires were distributed during school hours to ensure participation. The top news medium for this group was social media …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Franziska Thiele, whose focus is on what communication scholars are saying on Twitter, and on whether this reflects different styles in international research communities. The principal focus here is especially on the ICA and IAMCR communities on Twitter.

Twitter has been an important tool for such scholarly communication over the past decade and more, though this is now under threat given the disastrous leadership of Elon Musk, but this activity is unevenly distributed: biomedical and social scientists appear to be especially active on the platform. Twitter use in the context of …

The third presentation in this hot IAMCR 2023 session is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on the discussion of generative visual AI (e.g. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and its relationship to artists. There is a veritable media panic, but also a genuine discussion about how such generative AI tools are drawing on existing, copyrighted art for their creations.

Artists have reacted to this spreading of digital creation with some degree of concern: it challenges their role in society, their opportunity to earn a living from their art, and their authorship of creative works; many artists see the use of their …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vanessa Richter, whose interest is in the shaping of AI debates and trajectories on Twitter. Imaginaries of AI are still evolving, and involve a diverse set of stakeholders: industry, governments, NGOs, academia, and the media. This project examined the accounts engaging in the debate on Twitter, and classified these into a number of different stakeholder categories; on Twitter, much of the debate appeared to be driven by AI experts (and the same is likely true on WeChat as well, as other research shows).

The present project builds on the idea of …