'Big Data'

The second speaker in this final session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Bruna Silveira de Oliveira, whose focus is on using LLMs to study content in the Brazilian manosphere. Extremist groups in this space seek legitimisation, and the question here is whether LLMs can be used productively to analyse their posts.

This analysis focusses on some 2,500 episodes of Brazilian masculinist podcasts across ten streaming platforms. It engaged in an assisted content analysis using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and explored whether this could identify detailed variables in the content. The podcast episodes were transcribed using automated tools, and 52 episodes …

The final (!) session at this wonderful AoIR 2024 conference is on content analysis, and starts with Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam. Her interest is especially on questions of agreement and disagreement between content codings; the gold standard here has for a long time been intercoder reliability, but this tends to presume a single ground truth which may not exist in all coding contexts.

The concept of ‘constructs of marginalisation’ might be useful here: marginalised people are underrepresented; existing structural power defines who defines such constructs; they are historically and culturally shaped; and explicit as well as ambiguous and evasive language that discriminates …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The final presenters in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference are Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen; their interests are in the third-party fact-checking network employed by Meta. This operates on the basis of a Meta-provided online dashboard that highlights potentially problematic content, and the dashboard’s operation directs fact-checking away from political content spread by major political figures, and towards other forms of content.

Many fact-checking organisations around the world now substantially rely on income from Meta through their engagement in its fact-checking programme; this is part of a global post-publication debunking turn, but also creates a dependency on …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

Such intermediaries may be understood as cultural intermediaries, algorithmic experts, metricians, or content recommendation platforms; they may complement platforms or assist content production, and AI systems in particular retool, reshape, and rationalise the news. To explore this …

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.

Even before the rise of …

I am presenting our research on the in the Australian Facebook news ban in the post-lunch session at ECREA 2024 this Friday, but we start with a paper by Visa Noronen which examines news organisations’ attempts to understand their audiences in the current media context. This is important for determining editorial direction, and the present study examines such processes for the Nordic countries.

There has been a significant shift towards online news media use in these countries, and audiences are even often prepared to pay for online news subscriptions. Visa interviewed some 16 staff from news organisations that are not …

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

Kate’s work is interested centrally in the structure of texts, and dependency parsing is a useful tool for this – but such analytical frameworks also substantially complicate the analysis: dependency parsing can show up some 40 or more relationships between words …

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.

Deliberative public communication research tends to remain strongly influenced by Habermasian normativity, but this is not necessarily very productive. It ignores the right of participants not to be deliberative, and therefore fails to fully understand the phenomenon of dissonant public spheres, or the cumulative nature of public discussion. We need to better understand how opinions accumulate online.

Big data approaches are central …