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Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:42

Social Media Engagement in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

Politics | Elections | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

Electioneering in Pandemic Times: The 2022 Australian Federal Election on Facebook and Twitter from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:40

Coordinated Social Media Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

Politics | Elections | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

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Snurb — Friday 4 November 2022 01:38

Politicians’ and Journalists’ Tweets in the 2021 German Federal ELection

Politics | Elections | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2022 |

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 20:06

Misogynist Meme Culture and Its Positioning of Women

Politics | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Maja Brandt Andreasen, whose focus is on Internet humour that normalises sexual violence in response to the #metoo movement. Humour is often dismissed as harmless (Maja describes this as the ‘just a joke’ discourse), and feminist reactions to such offensive content are attacked as undermining humorous discourse.

Maja collected memes from 9gag, Imgur, and Reddit that responded to #metoo and related controversies, and found that memes had a strong androcentric perspective that represented men’s views; women usually appeared in the background and in relation to men. Men spoke, and women were …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 20:06

The Consequences of Doing Academic Research into the Far Right

Politics | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Antonia Vaughan, whose focus is on how we as academics can research the far right while minimising potential harms. This has been problematised by the neoliberal turn in academia, where precarity is the norm and critical research may be disincentivised. This promotes neoliberal ideas of academic individualism, encapsulated in the phrase ‘publish or perish’, or perhaps now ‘publish and perish’. Attention on articles has been increasingly metricised, including also via altmetrics that allow for connections and visibility in the public sphere outside of traditional academic spaces. This also valorises academic social …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 20:04

Understanding the Platform Logics of Alternative Social Media Sites

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

This has resulted in the platforming of racism and antisemitism, for instance, and in the emergence of platformed conspiracism. This emerges from the confluence of the specificities of the platforms themselves, and the emergent practices of …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 20:03

Reclaiming Alternative Social Media from the Alt-Right

Politics | Internet Technologies | Social Media | AoIR 2022 |

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

This is exemplified for instance by the Fediverse, a network of alternative social media sites that run …

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Snurb — Thursday 3 November 2022 06:06

Decolonising the Internet

Politics | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2022 |

It’s Wednesday, I think, so I’m in Dublin for the first face-to-face AoIR conference since AoIR 2019 in Brisbane. It’s genuinely delightful to be amongst this wonderful community again at last. As usual, the conference starts with the conference keynote by Nanjala Nyabola, addressing the conference theme of Decolonising the Internet. She begins by noting that the vast majority of people experience the Internet in a foreign tongue; and it is appropriate to address this issue in Ireland, which has had its own history of having its national identity and language suppressed for so long.

Nanjala’s keynote is based on …

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Snurb — Sunday 30 October 2022 02:57

'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Problematic Information Dissemination between 2016 and 2021 (ECREA 2022)

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2022 |

ECREA 2022

'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Problematic Information Dissemination between 2016 and 2021

Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Xue Ying (Jane) Tan, Edward Hurcombe, Nadia Jude, Phoebe Matich, Stephen Harrington, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Scott Wright

  • 21 Oct. 2022 – Paper presented at the ECREA 2022 conference, Aarhus

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Thursday 27 October 2022 04:23

A Few More Presentations from ECREA 2022

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2022 |

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

“Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior”: How Meta Shapes the Discussion of Mis/Disinformation on Facebook from Axel Bruns …
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