Facebook

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

The final presenter in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the excellent Hedwig Tønnesen, whose interest is in the strategies of political actors on three social media platforms. Social media are now widely used by such actors, of course, but have not necessarily delivered the wider democratic potential that some had seen in them; more often, they are simply used by parties to create engagement and mobilisation, or disseminate information and political advertising.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Giada Marino, presenting some of the work of the Vera.ai research project. Responding to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, the project focusses especially on the coordinated communication networks that share such content in order to influence and manipulate social media audiences, and has developed a content-agnostic tool that monitors the activities of identified problematic accounts.

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.