Future of Journalism 2017

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:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

I published a preview of some of the study’s key findings in The Conversation in May 2017. Meanwhile, my paper at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2017 built on this new Twittersphere map to test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in Australian Twitter – and found little evidence to support the thesis:

The final keynote speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Linda Steiner, who begins by introducing us to feminist standpoint epistemology: bodies of knowledge are socially situated and embodied, and this both limits and enables what one can know.

From this perspective, it is clear that there is a thin procedural view of objectivity at the basis of journalism – and this is a problem. This is simultaneously also a reason that Donald Trump and other critics of the mainstream media are able to attack the press as 'fake news' when it does not live up to a narrow standard of objectivity, and a reason that journalists themselves will choose to cover more straightforward stories rather than topics that would challenge their ability to remain objective.

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is An Nguyen, who begins by focussing on the role of major tech companies in influencing information exposure for their users, which has given rise to concepts like 'echo chambers' and 'filter bubbles'. Various studies have now started to explore the presence of such patterns, building on a variety of data and focussing on a range of contexts, communities, and cases – with highly variable outcomes.

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Jaume Suau, focussing on agenda-setting in the digital public sphere and exploring especially the role of Spanish citizens as online participants. Spanish users are highly active in engaging with political and social contexts, and this is focussed largely on commenting and sharing news (especially on Facebook and WhatsApp) rather than producing content. News media have failed to harness these energies fully so far.

The next presenter at Future of Journalism 2017 is Anja Bechmann, who shifts our focus to news engagement within the private and semi-private spaces of Facebook. Here, the Facebook newsfeed serves at least in part also as a news platform, where news stories are shared and curated in a collaborative fashion. News, here, is variously a journalistically, user-, and algorithmically defined concept.

The next Future of Journalism 2017 session starts with a paper by Kasper Welbers that explores the gatekeeping role of newspapers' social media editors (who manage their Facebook pages), in part by gathering engagement data for the posts on these pages through the Facebook API. Data gathering here is non-trivial, however, as it requires the regular re-gathering of engagement information over longer periods of time in order to establish engagement time-series.

The final paper in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is by Henrik Bødker and Scott Eldridge, which begins by positioning journalism as an inferential community. Journalism often operates in a context where there is an absence of facts, but in writing about matters of societal significance rumours and other unsubstantiated information cannot be ignored and excluded. Instead, inferences – statements about the unknown, based on the known – need to be made.

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Scott Eldridge, whose interest is in the presence of 'fake news' in its various guises in political campaign coverage. This includes news, rumour, and speculative fact, and indeed attempts to address political rumour go back at least to the Roman Empire.

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Bente Kalsnes, whose aim is to develop a more systematic approach to 'fake news' in the Norwegian context. Bente has some personal experience with this: her photo and name appeared in a Norwegian newspaper as a future Member of Parliament, even though she is not actually a candidate in the upcoming election.

The next Future of Journalism 2017 session starts with Julian Petley, who begins by noting the problems with the term 'fake news'. Some such news is deliberately made up as clickbait; some is overt or covert political propaganda; some is not made up but simply seriously biased or inaccurate; and some is deliberately made up for the purposes of media critique or satire.