'Big Data'

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider transnational picture in Europe; it examines the production, pictures, publics, and propagation of climate change-related narratives across platforms. Key platforms here include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, and a key interest is in concepts related to interactional, positional, and affective polarisation amongst the users who engage with relevant (visual) content.

The next speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Andrew Fitzgerald, whose interest is in the use of longitudinal mobile screenshot data in research. This is another response to the emerging challenges in doing research on the power of platforms – platform infrastructures continue to change in their interface design and affordances, algorithmic curation affects what actual content users encounter, access approaches to platform data keep evolving, and new platforms emerge all the time. This means that we need independent data collection methods, beyond what the platforms themselves do or do not provide, that can cope with all of these issues.

The second day of our P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference focusses on research methods, and starts with a presentation by the excellent Jessica Gabriele Walter. Her focus is on YouTube data donations. Conventional social media data access has been via platform APIs and third-party platform initiatives like Social Science One; an alternative to this are user-centric approaches like browser tracking or data donation, which is growing in prominence.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Megan Brown, whose focus is on the impact of the closure of the Twitter API on public-interest research. The discontinuation of Twitter’s Academic API was announced in February 2023, and remaining APIs are priced exorbitantly and outside the reach of publicly-funded researchers; this has severely affected any further research on the platform.

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.