Social Media

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Juho Vesa, whose interest is whether social media activity serves to empower traditionally weaker political groups, such as NGOs. Media success for such groups may simply mean media access, or also a greater involvement in agenda-building through their media presence.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 is Moran Yarchi, whose interest is also in the uses of social media in election campaigns. But few recent studies have specifically examined the uses of social media by female politicians: much of the work on the role of women in politics still focusses on other matters, including mainstream media representation.

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Augusto Valeriani, who undertook a study of the popularisation of political communication, examining the social media activities of 51 leaders across 18 Western democracies. Ordinary users may encounter such activities both through directly following these leaders (bond engagement) or through more accidental exposure (bridge engagement); to reach the latter, politicians will need to generate information cascades.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Lukasz Szulc, who shifts our attention to our digital profiles. Profile making is now ubiquitous in digital culture, especially of course in social networking sites and with the continuing move towards a platformisation of the Internet. Through our increased use of mobile devices they have also become more pervasive.

The final speaker in our ICA 2018 panel is Neil Thurman. He notes that beyond the platform studies we must also look at the intersections between different social networks and platforms, and at the broader societal debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles. His work builds on the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey (covering 26 countries), and explores how aware and concerned users are of and about the algorithmic and editorial selection of the news content they engage with.

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):