SM&S 2024

For the final Social Media & Society 2024 session today I’m in a panel on online music cultures, which starts with Jenessa Williams, whose interest is in how fans decide to continue or discontinue their fandom for artists accused of sexual misconduct, especially also in the context of changing music consumption habits. The focus here is on smaller, genre-specific cases rather than widely publicised allegations against superstars.

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

The next session at Social Media & Society 2024 starts with Leiyuan Tian, who is interested in pro-China influencers on Twitter. These practice a kind of grey propaganda, part of the overall network of Chinese public diplomacy but not formally representing the Chinese government. How do such influencers present themselves, and what persuasive frames do they employ?

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Sergei Pashakhin, whose is in the interfacing between platform companies and political institutions, especially in the context of autocratising regimes. Social media platforms operate around the world, and have to respond to the political and legislative situations in the countries in which they operate. Their transparency reports tend to provide a window into how they do so: these reports cover state requests for content moderation and take-downs, for instance.

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jeeyun Sophia Baik, whose interest is in the long-standing allegations of anti-conservative bias that have been made against social media platforms. Such claims have been embraced prominently by Donald Trump and other far-right actors, in particular, and some US politicians have even attempted to ban what they understand as ‘social media censorship’.

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Damien Renard, whose interest is in the power dynamics between platform operators and user communities. The focus here is on StackExchange, where moderators went on strike in protest against the platform’s May 2023 policy change to allow AI-generated content.

The post-lunch session at Social Media & Society 2024 is on platform governance, and starts with Paloma Viejo Otero. Her focus is on the question of platform safety, which has become an increasingly important issue for social media platforms.

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Victoria O’Meara, whose focus is on the anti-vaccine ‘Children’s Health Defense’ group, founded in 2016 and directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until 2013; it is a key driver of health-related mis- and disinformation campaigns in the context COVID-19 and beyond.