Politics

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Nicholas Corbett, whose focus is on ties between the alt-right, Gamergate, and the MAGA movement on Reddit. This entanglement has taken place for the best part of the past ten years or so, but exactly how strong are the links between these groups, and how does this manifest on Reddit’s?

This project explores a network of some 51 relevant subreddits that share a certain amount of participants. The focus here is especially on the subreddit’s core constituency: those users who participate more in the specific subreddit than in any of …

The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Eve Cheng, whose interest is in party structures in parliamentary networks – party structures here means personal and professional backgrounds, including military and civilian careers, party memberships, educational track records, etc.

The assumption here is that such backgrounds might determine party structures, predict electoral success, and affect policy-making. Key metrics here were average maximal flow (assessing the global network) and transitivity (focussing on local structures), and a comparison between these two networks is especially interesting.

In 1960s Australian Labor, for instance, there was one large trade unionist cluster, with one …

The second day at the ACSPRI 2024 conference dawns with a session on social network mapping, and starts with a paper by our wonderful conference chair Rob Ackland. This presents work on an international collaboration around technology and political communication, with a particular focus on social bots. This explores especially the potential for such bots to connect people with different ideas online, with the aim to improve public discourse.

This requires us, in the first place, to understand where discussion and deliberation are occurring in online spaces: deliberative conversations require both diversity (or representation of different ideas) and argumentation (a …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sair Buckle, whose interest is in the use of Large Language Models to detect bullying language in organisational contexts. Bullying is of course a major societal problem, including in companies, and presents a psychosocial hazard: there are several proposed approaches to address it, including surveys and interviews and manual linguistic classification (e.g. in federal parliament), which are subjective and manually intensive; pulse surveys and self-labelling questionnaires (e.g. in companies), which are subjective and limited in their data access; and there are technology-first approaches using LLMs and machine learning to detect …

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.

From here, it turned into a hybrid online and offline campaign; it was endorsed by far-right celebrities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and …

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …