AoIR 2022

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 is E. Brooke Phipps, whose focus is on how TikTok activists in the US fight conservatism and disinformation. This can be seen as a form of trolling directed at disinformation propagators, and thus turning a prominent practice of the far right against it: tactical trolling has now also emerged as a key form of digital resistance by left-wing activists (also in South Korea). This is also a youth practice: nearly half of all TikTok users are understood to be younger than 30 years.

The next speaker in this fast-paced final AoIR 2022 session is Maximilian Schlüter, who is also interested in disinformative communities. He notes that a specific understanding of disinformation has emerged that does not necessarily capture all forms and formats of disinformation – today, disinformation is far more widespread and mundane than previously imagined.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform.

The final day at AoIR 2022 starts with a session on toxic behaviour, and a paper by Marco Bastos and Shawn Walker on the Twitter Compliance API. Twitter has a number of APIs: best known of these are the REST API (access to read and write Twitter data), Search API (to search tweets from the past seven days), and Streaming API (to produce a continuous stream of new tweets matching the search terms).

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities.