Social Media

My next conference for this year is Social Media & Society 2018, where I’m also presenting two papers with different research teams. The first session I’m in starts with Jeff Hemsley, who highlights the need to look at niche social media sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore, his focus here is on Dribbble: a site for designers that asks “what are you working on”, and uses basketball metaphors (players, shots, rebounds, playoffs) for users, posts, etc. The site does not provide affordances for content sharing, however, because designers see this as an unauthorised use of …

The next presentation in this ICA 2018 session is by Drew Margolin, who highlights the growing use of computational methods in communication, and therefore the need to further scrutinise the methods that are popular here. Truth is revealed and reviewed through a succession of studies.

Success therefore depends on collective efficiency at testing and corroborating ideas, and replacing discarded ideas with new work. Existing theory must be tested for its relevance, by applying it to explain observable patterns in the available data; observations must also be used to generate hitherto unimaginable hypotheses. This should also encourage multi-causal explanations through causal …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.

Such image recognition platforms may not necessarily produce intuitive or meaningful results. The project automatically extracted the most salient labels these tools had provided for the images, and then computationally grouped these into a number of overarching topics …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.

User information is also incomplete, and geodata is largely unreliable and limited to some 1% of all tweets. Further, genuine users are mixed with bots in the datasets – better bot …

I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.

Keyword query data collected via the Twitter API are not representative of the underlying population: it returns representative, but not necessarily complete data. When the rate limits are hit, the data are truncated, though not on the basis of specific features. The biases that result from such selection are likely to be substantial.

What factors drive such search API sampling, then? Content …

Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.

Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds …

The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.

In Britain, the referendum was also decided strongly along geographic lines (city vs. country, England vs. Scotland) – so is there a geographic element to any echo chamber patterns that may exist here? The present study captured pro- and …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is Dam Hee Kim, whose focus is on what effects exposure to diverse political viewpoints has on partisan views. Such exposure has always been seen as important for a healthy democracy, but this poses two major challenges: audiences do not necessarily actively seek out diverse viewpoints, and such diverse exposure does not necessarily bring about the democratic benefits that theory would expect.

First, audiences tend to expose themselves to news that is in line with their established personal views. Today, they might see a variety of news also via Facebook and other …

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Juho Vesa, whose interest is whether social media activity serves to empower traditionally weaker political groups, such as NGOs. Media success for such groups may simply mean media access, or also a greater involvement in agenda-building through their media presence.

Larger groups can use their digital presences as a platform to feed directly into journalistic processes. Smaller groups, however, might need to generate broader interest on social media first, which may then attract media coverage; this follows a networked media logic and may mean that the status of the group initiating …