Politics

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 Mengyu Li, whose interest is in link-sharing patterns on Twitter and Reddit, here in the context of the abortion debate in the US following the Supreme Court’s abolition of Roe vs. Wade. Which information domains are critical in this context – health and welfare, civic and activism, political and legal, economic and employment information? How do social media platforms address these information needs? What primary sources are being shared here?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Francesco Bailo, whose focus is on the Italian Five Star Movement, or M5S. This was a disruptive political movement launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, and this study examined its activities across five platforms: Grillo’s blog, Meetup.com, the M5S Forum, Facebook, and the movement’s e-voting platform which was used to select electoral candidates. The focus here is on 2012 primary elections in the party.

The Sunday at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a session on digital affordances of social media platforms, and begins with a paper by Christian Baden. Social media are many and diverse, and their affordances keep changing; this still needs to be better understood. Social movements are also many and diverse, which also means that the intersections between social media and social movements can be various, and the particular political intentions and communicative purposes of those movements need to be considered in this.

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 next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Seo Yoon Lee, whose interest is in toxic communicative behaviours, and especially counter-normative opinion expression in online communities. Such community dissidents are often understood as online trolls seeking to introduce community chaos, but this behaviour can be seen as both toxic or constructive: it is toxic if it is done simply to disrupt and aggravate, but constructive if it genuinely seeks to highlight alternative views.