The next session at ECREA 2018 is one that I have a paper in as well – but we start with Marcel Broersma. He begins by asking whether journalism is truly at home in social media: do its strategies align with user tactics in these platforms, and are the platforms being colonised by news organisations? How are publics for journalism constructed on these platforms, and do users have any interest in being interpellated as publics here?
Audiences may consider social media as spaces to connect for interpersonal communication; in that case, social media predominantly have a social function. There could …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters …
The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2018 is Anne-Marie in der Au, who notes evidence that individual selection of media content may foster polarisation; however, there is also suspicion that algorithmic selection may foster such polarisation by building on and reinforcing such selective exposure. But empirical evidence on this is divided; several studies show no algorithmic impact or even demonstrate a negative correlation. What is going on here, and are there other variables that may interfere?
The present study examined these dynamics for the case of Germany, building on a representative phone survey. This measured the polarisation of …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.
Potential drivers for such negativity may include …
The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Jasmin Kadel, who presents a comparative study of polarisation across Switzerland and Germany. Polarisation can be understood along factual (across issues), perceived (misjudgments about polarisation in society), and affective dimensions (appreciation of co-partisan others); the study examined such polarisation amongst adult newspaper readers in both countries.
Factual polarisation turned out to be slightly stronger in Switzerland than in Germany, but it is weak in both countries; perceived polarisation, however, is greater in both countries, and especially so in Germany – Germans are less polarised but see them selves as more polarised …
The first session on this first full day at ECREA 2018 is on polarisation, and starts with Melanie Magin. She begins by highlighting the potential deleterious effects of polarisation on society: societies need a common meeting ground, and this has traditionally been provided by the news media and their agenda-setting function. But the diversification of information sources and channels may contribute to fragmenting this, and the algorithmic selection of content in these channels could aid this fragmentation – yet there is very little empirical evidence for the existence of the echo chambers or filter bubbles this is said to cause …
The final iCS Symposium session continues the bot theme with a presentation by Pascal Jürgens. Pascal begins by outlining our current dilemma: threats of communicative manipulation via social media are rising, yet our access to the platform data we need to understand these activities is declining. But we may be able to address this dilemma by employing new and different methodologies.
Interestingly, in Germany there are now moves to create a law that requires bots to be labelled – yet this is unlikely to be effective unless there can be a clear definition of bots in the first place, and …
It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.
Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …
The final keynote speaker at this iCS Symposium today is the wonderful Katrin Weller, whose focus is on what we do with social media research data: datasets that have been collected by researchers and have already been utilised in scholarly analysis. How are such datasets shared on and archived by these researchers? Sharing here means directly passing these datasets on for use by others, while archiving preserves them for potential future uses. Both practices potentially advance reproducibility and comparability, reduce digital divides in data accessibility between researchers and research groups, and save time and money in data collection; they are …
