Social Media

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Lukasz Szulc, who shifts our attention to our digital profiles. Profile making is now ubiquitous in digital culture, especially of course in social networking sites and with the continuing move towards a platformisation of the Internet. Through our increased use of mobile devices they have also become more pervasive.

Profiles are how we write ourselves into digital being: they enable and suggest different ways of presenting ourselves, and foreclose others; and they are deeply enmeshed with the architectures, design, and governance of social media. Through this, social media platforms build certain …

The final speaker in our ICA 2018 panel is Neil Thurman. He notes that beyond the platform studies we must also look at the intersections between different social networks and platforms, and at the broader societal debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles. His work builds on the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey (covering 26 countries), and explores how aware and concerned users are of and about the algorithmic and editorial selection of the news content they engage with.

Some 57% of respondents are worried about missing out on challenging viewpoints and important information as a result of such …

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):

The second ICA 2018 session this morning is the one I have a paper in as well – we’re discussing the (scant) empirical evidence for echo chambers and filter bubbles. We start, though, with a paper by Anja Bechmann that is working with a broad sample of newsfeed data from Danish Facebook users.

The newsfeed potentially acts as a shared public news platform where people meet around shared news content. ‘News’ here might mean many things – journalistic, political news in a narrow sense, but also user-oriented relation news and the user updates of many kinds that newsfeed algorithms treat …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Brian Weeks, who explores the ecology of incidental news exposure. The various elements of that ecology determine who is exposed to news content, and to what extent, and what impacts such exposure may generate.

In the ecological model of incidental exposure, a number of individual and environmental factors combine. Such factors may be related, respectively, to contextual states or more fundamental traits of the individual or their environment. They include individual traits like cognitive ability or socioeconomic status, but also traits like cognitive load; self-concept traits like partisan identity or states …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Kjerstin Thorson, who begins by noting that incidental exposure is not simply random, but unevenly distributed across the online userbase. The idea of attraction may be useful here: what is it that attracts specific news content into a social media stream; who attracts incidental exposure? What practices produce attraction, or repel news content?

Who has these happy accidents of incidental exposure, then? In the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, better levels of education mean that users are more likely to be incidentally exposed. The factors that seem to matter …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Richard Fletcher, who highlights the shift in news users’ main source of news – away from conventional sources and towards online, digital, app-based, and social media channels. This has been linked by some with a rise in echo chambers and filter bubbles, but the incidental news exposure that such platforms also engender means that it has been very difficult to find any real evidence for filter bubbles beyond isolated extreme cases.

One important aspect in all of this is automated incidental news exposure: do incidentally exposed news users actively curate their …

The next ICA 2018 session is on incidental news exposure, and starts with a paper presented by Pablo Boczkowski. ‘Incidental’ here means that people encounter the news without actively seeking to do so. Such work on this has been predominantly quantitative, but there is some more qualitative work on this topic emerging as well. Most of this work has been focussing on single countries in the developed world, too.

Incidental consumption of news is far from new, but is becoming more important in digital and social media contexts, and with the rise in news consumption via mobile devices. Some groups …