Politics

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

Twitch has made the individual easier to reach (and achieve reach) than ever before; most streamers are not backed by major gaming companies, but act as single agents who create gaming broadcast content and in doing so must adopt and follow certain performance practices: this may …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The CPI was formed by the federal senate, and broadcast on TV, symbolically replacing Big Brother Brazil …

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

The case study focusses on Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, who has been in the office since 2019 and therefore through the COVID-19 pandemic. She leads a minority Social Democrat government – an unusual setup in …

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Elizabeth Poole, whose interest is in counter-narratives against Islamophobia and their potential for mediated activism. This incorporates a computational analysis of discussions on Twitter related to Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and COVID-19, as well as qualitative and network analysis of these datasets.

The counter-narratives against Islamophobia in these tweets might be understood as mediated solidarity, and in he Brexit dataset there was considerable evidence of such support for Muslims, yet this did not necessarily result in sustained supporting discussions in follow-up tweets; this might be understood as a form of …

Just made it in time to the next session at AoIR 2023, which starts with a paper by Yiran Duan on deleted tweets. The focus here is on deleted tweets in the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag during three key periods (including Black History Month in 2020 and 2021 and a police brutality trial in 2021). Some 37% of these have become unavailable in the last couple of years. This is comparable to the 33% of deleted Brexit tweets (but that deletion rate occurred in four years), and much more than 19% generic tweets deleted in four years that other studies have …

The final paper in this AoIR 2023 session was my own, presenting on behalf of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, who also works with the URL shares dataset provided by Facebook via Social Science One. He also utilises the generative artificial intelligence tools now provided by OpenAI in order to examine the themes of and partisan attention to the topics circulating in discourse surrounding the 2018 and 2022 Italian election campaigns.

The URL shares dataset is centred on users’ engagement with URLs, and contains some random Gaussian noise designed to prevent the re-identifiability of users. The present project extracted the title and description of political URLs mainly …

Next up in our AoIR 2023 session is the wonderful Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on understanding the processes that led to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the United States. She builds on an analysis of every Facebook and Twitter post and Facebook and Instagram ad by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and focusses here especially on Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election.

One of his key points of focus was on mail-in ballots (which were especially common in the 2020 election as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), questioning the validity of such ballots and …

The next session at AoIR 2023 is our own panel, and starts with a presentation by Jessica Walter and Anja Bechmann. Their focus is on influence processes surrounding verified false content across the EU, with particular focus on national differences between EU countries as well as differences driven by other demographic factors. The EU is relatively understudied with respect to the influence of mis- and disinformation, compared to the US and other countries.

The distribution of verified false content represents a case study of unwanted influence; the present study focusses on false content on Facebook as identified by Meta’s third-party …