Social Media

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

Homophily and antagonism drive such processes. But homophily is extremely common and not necessarily a problem in itself; some homophily is natural, and it only becomes a problem in extreme situations. The question is therefore whether homophily increases over time …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Asta Zelenkauskaite, whose interest is in micro- as well as macro-perspectives on influence in online contexts. This understands influence as non-linear and context-dependent, mediated by available media and information infrastructures and their affordances.

Asta’s study is focussing on the deviant spaces where influence is deliberately orchestrated and shaped by interested users. The study investigates the far-right social media platform Gab, and how its users make sense of the Russian trolling news frame. The platform is designed to cater to specific audiences and discourses, but is open to anyone to contribute …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly …

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

Sharing links to the news on social media is now also a form of cultural currency, therefore. Compared to other forms of news transmission, sharing news links increases the speed and reach of the news …

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.

What is the role of Instagram in Germany in this context, then, especially in the context of the 2017 federal and state elections? How do …

The second paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Klaus Zilles, whose focus is on the distribution of disinformation on WhatsApp. The messaging platform has been embroiled in disinformation events in a number of countries in recent times, and has now begun to fund several research projects into the phenomenon, including the present study in Spain.

Spanish users are relatively active on the platform, spending more than one hour per day on average on WhatsApp. They are also increasingly using it to share the news, shifting away from more open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to …

We finish the sessions at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium with our second keynote, by Rebekah Tromble. She begins provocatively by suggesting that we as digital media researchers need to get over ourselves, so this should be interesting.

Many of the current problems for digital media research stem from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in the shutdown of many of the primary sources of social media research data – especially the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of leading platforms. Most applications for API access to Facebook are now denied, for instance; the Instagram platform API was scheduled for shutdown even …