The final speaker at this ECREA 2018 session is my QUT colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals, who shifts our focus to the vexing question of ‘fake news’. However we define such content, it appears to have had a considerable effect on recent events, and some of the most shared stories on Facebook in recent years have been revealed as mis- or disinformation.

There are also a number of dedicated Websites that have been set up to peddle ‘fake news’, and these are often immensely active at generating and disseminating new content. Such sites are also relevant to our study of Journalism …

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.

In ‘fake news’, there is a relation between the content, its dissemination, and the users involved in that dissemination. ‘Fake news’ itself can also be distinguished into mis-, dis- …

The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

What is interesting about Jenna Abrams ‘her’-self is the creation of a distinct persona and mode of self-presentation; this account represents an interpersonal mode of disinformation. This is a form of the authenticity work which is also common to the online persona construction by ordinary users, strategic actors …

The next speaker in this iCS Symposium is Michael Bossetta, who focusses on the specific problems of spearphishing, disinformation, and bot activity on social media platforms. Could these problems be investigated by researchers conducting a controlled, simulated cyberattack themselves?

Michael pursued this especially for the context of Twitter, which seems most conducive to such research. This drew on the Python software SNAP_R, which captures the recent tweets from a defined list of accounts and uses Markov models to generate new messages to these users that to speak to their apparent interests. Michael created a new Twitter account to post …

The final iCS Symposium session continues the bot theme with a presentation by Pascal Jürgens. Pascal begins by outlining our current dilemma: threats of communicative manipulation via social media are rising, yet our access to the platform data we need to understand these activities is declining. But we may be able to address this dilemma by employing new and different methodologies.

Interestingly, in Germany there are now moves to create a law that requires bots to be labelled – yet this is unlikely to be effective unless there can be a clear definition of bots in the first place, and …

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …