Social Media

After a quick break I’ve made my way to Copenhagen for the iCS Symposium “Locked Out of Social Platforms”, and the first panel of the day starts with a paper by Nicholas Proferes. His focus is on how power is manifested in the platform affordances of social media: these include affordances such as the persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of content.

Nick focusses here on the case of WikiLeaks’ release of the Podesta Emails, from a hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s email. These were released over thirty batches, starting just after Donald Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood …

The final speakers in this final session of AoIR 2018 are Lianrui Jia and Xiaofei Han, whose focus is on the changing politics of the major Chinese social media platform Weibo. It now has some 340 million users, and has a market capitalisation of US$13b. But Weibo remains significantly underresearched, and there are only a handful of major studies of the platform in the international literature to date.

Such literature has yet to reflect the full range of activities that take place on the platform. While the literature focusses largely on the political implications of Weibo, the platform …

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.

The impeachment process showed considerable political polarisation between the left and the right in Brazil; while many on the left supported the President, the right actively supported impeachment. Crucial to the debate on social media were superparticipants: highly active users who may be …

Then next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Eedan Amit-Danhi, who continues our focus on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and especially investigates the role of infographics during this contest. Such infographics have become increasingly important in recent years, partly as a result of the rise of digital and social media – but what makes specific infographics successful?

Enhancers of an infographic’s success may be cognitive (employing proven infographic presentation methods), behavioural (calling users to action and providing interactive features), or emotional (triggering users’ positive or negative emotions). The present study examined the infographics used by the final four presidential candidates …

I’ve missed another session due to AoIR business, but I’m back for the last paper session at AoIR 2018. We start with Joel Penney, whose focus is on the use of social media by young people in the Trump era. He suggests that young people had moved from dutiful to actualising forms of citizenship, where political engagement is no longer just a duty to the state but aims to realise a better form of politics. Such engagement is also playful and creative, including in more partisan contexts.

Joel pursued these ideas through a focus group-based study of 18 politically …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Simin Kargar, whose focus is on the harassment of civil society actors on the Iranian Internet. Such harassment and suppression has a long history in Iran, and is affected by shifts in the availability and popularity of platforms – Simin and her colleagues interviewed a range of actors (journalists, media producers, activists, ...), in Iran and the international diaspora, to explore these issues.

Diasporic civil society members were disproportionately targetted; gender is a particular component of vulnerability, and the abuse of family members still in Iran is a prominent tool for …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is William Moner, whose focus is on participatory media systems analysis, especially in relation to the political economy of communication. This is inspired by Vincent Mosco’s call for a bridge between political economics, communication studies, and cultural studies, as well as related fields.

Much of this has to do with how power is configured in certain spaces, and how control flows from such configurations. William points to a number of case studies from the area of digital storytelling across YouTube, blogs, and other platforms; these are variously major commercial, NGO-backed, or …

Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

These opponents criticised Anne’s positioning as a feminist icon, and considerable discursive struggles between the two sides emerged. Anne is often depicted as a young girl with unmistakeable agency, unusual …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

Offline, there has been a broad historical change in the boundary policing by DIY music scenes in the UK; this takes place in cooperatively run independent venues and creates a close-knit community while …

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides: