The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.
This understood platforms as mere intermediaries, carrying content, yet more forceful interventions by platforms to shape communication practices – e.g. by deplatforming unacceptable speech acts and actors – have shown that platforms are themselves also active and self-interested stakeholders here, whose algorithmic interventions complicate the …