Social Media

The next presenter in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Oluwaseun Ajao, who shifts our focus to the question of ‘fake news’ on Twitter. Why is such content circulated on the platform? In part this is because these stories often generate more impact than ‘real’ news stories: this might result in significant shifts in political opinion, financial gains, or other outcomes that are desirable to the operators behind such initiatives.

The present study explores whether the veracity of a set of tweets might be able to be ascertained through automated content analysis. Are there semantic of linguistic …

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

Estonians are particularly strong Internet (and social media) users; this is especially pronounced for younger Estonians. When the European refugee crisis emerged, this manifested in the rapid creation of various …

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Lea Stahel, who begins with the story of two Muslim schoolkids in a Swiss school, who refused to shake the hand of their female teacher for cultural reasons. This was settled quickly within the school itself, but was raised again out of context by online media coverage some three months after the event, demonstrating how non-mediated and mediated contexts can diverge in the digital age.

There is a perception of legitimacy at the macro-level that influences particular publics’ judgments and actions, and that is affected in turn by …

The next paper in this Social Media and Society 2018 session is by Michael Bossetta, Chris Zimmermann, and Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, whose interest is in patterns in post-Brexit Facebook discussions. In particular, what is the role of emotions in these discussions, and what are their implications? The project gathered data using the Vox Populi data collection, enhanced with other data.

The analysis employed SentiStrength and other sentiment detection algorithms to assess the sentiment, emotionality, arousal, core emotions, and fine-grained feelings in Facebook posts from three major Facebook pages related to the Brexit referendum; most of the discussion took place here …

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

One of the common targets in this complicated manoeuvre is George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire who is generally accused of funding liberal civil society institutions and has been attacked by …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

For the user, this manifests in multiple server calls as they access the media organisation’s content; in addition to the media organisation, their devices also access various content elements from a range of other platforms. This is not …

The final paper in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is the result of a collaboration between my QUT colleagues and me and our friends at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, exploring approaches to detecting Twitter bots that promote SoundCloud tracks. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Max Sjöblom, whose focus is on the nexus between social media and eSports. eSports has become increasingly popular in recent times, and refers to forms of sport that are facilitated by electronic systems, where input as well as output are processed by computers. This can take place in a networked environment, but increasingly there are also eSports tournaments being staged in live venues (with additional online streaming).

The present study examined these developments through surveys distributed during the Assembly 2016 eSports event in Finland, extracting psychometric measures of …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Michelle Gorea, whose focus is on the role of visuality in everyday communication among young users. Many more recent social media applications are designed to be accessed via smartphones, and representations of the visual self have therefore become a far more routine activity. Much of the research into these activities are only talking about teens, however, rather than with them. Instead, it is important to understand from these users themselves how they integrate images into their daily communicative practices.

This can be understood from the perspective of ‘deep …