The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Antonia Vaughan, whose focus is on how we as academics can research the far right while minimising potential harms. This has been problematised by the neoliberal turn in academia, where precarity is the norm and critical research may be disincentivised. This promotes neoliberal ideas of academic individualism, encapsulated in the phrase ‘publish or perish’, or perhaps now ‘publish and perish’. Attention on articles has been increasingly metricised, including also via altmetrics that allow for connections and visibility in the public sphere outside of traditional academic spaces. This also valorises academic social …

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

This has resulted in the platforming of racism and antisemitism, for instance, and in the emergence of platformed conspiracism. This emerges from the confluence of the specificities of the platforms themselves, and the emergent practices of …

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

This is exemplified for instance by the Fediverse, a network of alternative social media sites that run …

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

Alternative news environments, then, are constituted by those actors who have shared the same alternative URLs either directly or by on-sharing other actors’ shares. The project worked with a sample of some 160 left-wing, right-wing, and ideologically different alternative news media across Germany, Austria, Sweden, and …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The literature so far tells us that Facebook appears to be used especially for international connections between different political actors, and for sharing mainstream and alternative news; on Twitter there are denser networks within countries or language spaces, which are …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to this are also alternative news media sites that present their own views as a corrective to the mainstream. In Germany, these are deeply rooted in right-wing and populist communities, and are supportive of counter-hegemonic attitudes, including to COVID-19 containment measures. But the alternative media spectrum is complex: there is a continuum of outlets from mainstream-style outlets (via people who also …

It’s Saturday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’ve arrived a little too late to see the start of the session on online counterpublics, where Kilian Bühling is already in the middle of his presentation on German counterpublics on Telegram in the context of COVID-19.

The study explored what media content and media actors are being referenced in such counterpublics, and shows a considerable presence of political right-wing and radical (Querdenker) actors, but also that these developments ands their underlying ecosystem are not uniform. Distinct ecosystems are getting established here: both internal and external to Telegram. And there is a …