For the past few years I have published regular monthly updates of the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) at The Conversation and at Mapping Online Publics. As that partnership has now come to an end and the writing of regular updates had become somewhat onerous, we’ve developed a new approach to sharing the trends in how content from Australian news sites is being shared on Twitter.
From now on, ATNIX is published through a live, interactive dashboard which shows day-to-day trends and lists the most shared URLs for any given timeframe (click ‘full screen’ to enlarge):
Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past …
Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:
Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:
What are the major challenges in Internet research?
The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Mark Owen Jones, whose focus is on social media propaganda in Persian Gulf states. Overall, there is still a considerable lack of research into social media propaganda in Arabic; in Gulf states, there is a long history of 'fake news' in social media, and hate speech towards particular groups, ethnicities, and countries is not uncommon. Hate speech may be operationalised by ruling autocrats as a tool to divide and rule the population; different religious groups are allowed to attack each other, to keep them from uniting and toppling the government.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Alex Hogan, whose focus is on the impact of online political communities in politics. There is still considerable debate on whether online action promotes or retards other forms of collective action offline; the recent rise of the 'alt-right' adds another chapter to this discussion.
'Alt-right' activists have made effective use of the Internet and especially of social media to organise and coordinate their activities, attack their enemies, and disseminate their propaganda and narratives. These activists exist largely outside of conventional conservative parties, and refute conventional political processes while supporting alternative, outsider …
I arrived late to the final AoIR 2017 session on computational propaganda, and I think it's Samantha Bradshaw speaking at the moment. She's presenting the overall Computational Propaganda project at the University of Oxford, which from secondary source research identified some 23 countries that were known to be using some kind of informational warfare online at this stage.
The recent report from the project identifies social media uses in computational propaganda since 2010, which mainly focus inwardly and target domestic audiences; authoritarian regimes are especially active. Democratic countries are more likely to target external audiences, but sometimes also target specific …
