Social Media

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 …

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 …