I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:
The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.
This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the …
The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference is Rumeng Cao, whose focus is on Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent body introduced in response to increasingly critical scrutiny of the platform’s moderation and governance decisions following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Such governance can be divided into three phases: thin self-regulation (until 2012), strengthened self-regulation (2012-18), and the Oversight Board era (from 2018).
This can also be analysed from the perspective of the relationship between discourse and institutions: institutions are manifested through their discursive practices, but they also exist in a field of power relationships between their various stakeholders. This is …
I was the next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session, presenting our research on the changes in news posting and engagement during Facebook’s brief news ban in Australia in late February 2021, following the introduction of Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code. We would have liked to examine this for the ongoing news ban in Canada since August 2023, too, but unfortunately the Facebook URL Shares dataset has not been updated since November 2022, so we have not data to work with at this stage.
The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)
Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …
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:
