Facebook

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list. That stack drew on that list to gather public posts from Facebook’s CrowdTangle data service between 2016 and 2022 (some 42 million of them, from around 918,000 public pages and groups); identify the 1,000 most prominent pages and groups sharing problematic information; gather all of their posts during these years, independent of whether they contained problematic information or not (some 70 million from the 953 still available public pages and groups); and examine – through topic modelling and practice mapping – what else they talked about.

Slides are here, and more live-blogging below:

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular.

And we’ll finish the day at I-POLHYS 2024 with my keynote, which builds on the work of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team to review the types of polarisation that have been identified in the literature and develop the concept of destructive polarisation as a particularly concerning stage of polarisation dynamics. Our research proposes five distinct symptoms of destructive polarisation – and in the keynote I reflect on the recent Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to explore to what extent these five symptoms of destructive polarisation were present in the news and digital media debates in the lead-up to the referendum.

Here are the slides for the presentation:

The final speaker in this excellent opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is the equally excellent Fabio Giglietto from the Vera.AI project, whose focus is on media political partisanship and polarisation in Italy. Especially noteworthy here is also that his project explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in news and social media research – a new approach that also needs a great deal of new validation approaches.

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.