Politics

The next speaker in this fast-paced final AoIR 2022 session is Maximilian Schlüter, who is also interested in disinformative communities. He notes that a specific understanding of disinformation has emerged that does not necessarily capture all forms and formats of disinformation – today, disinformation is far more widespread and mundane than previously imagined.

Maximilian’s focus is particularly on white male supremacist communities, and here on ‘Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity’ (RMEM) memes and how they are circulated and remixed: are we asking the right questions and telling the right stories as we study such forms of disinformation, and does this approach …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

The 2022 Cybersecurity Challenge extended this further, and focussed in part also on anti-feminist disinformation; this employed a similarly limited perspective. NATO is …

For the final (boo!) session at AoIR 2022 I’m in a session on feminist approaches to disinformation, and Alice Marwick is already in full flight and discussing the followers of conspiracy theories as interpretive communities. They are social phenomena, communities, and connected by the Internet; their members are socialised into ways of knowledge-making and understanding over time, building their conspiratorial literacy that enables them to make connections between conspiracist factoids and produce counterfactual narrative.

Notably, there are a fair number of young people of colour involved in these conspiracy theories, well beyond the ‘Fox Mulder’ stereotype of the …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists interpret supposedly ‘hidden knowledge’ and connect it across domains in order to support their worldviews; this develops …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform. Such platforms have been used as a refuge for refugees from mainstream platforms following their deplatforming, and enable them to further foment their extreme views; they have played a role in a range of political debates …

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities. So, this research is interested in the categorical markers for information deemed to be (un)trustworthy in local contexts, the reflection of local milieux by global conspiracy theories, and the localised analysis of this research.

The project gathered data from Twitter in …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Tuomas Heikkilä and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in pseudoanonymous communicators during the COVID-19 crisis. These users use semi-stable pseudonyms, so they are neither identifiable nor fully anonymous, and the present study explored their role in political debate around the pandemic. This builds on the theory of connective action: organised communication without the presence of a central organisation coordinating activities. This can be more personal, more scalable, and more rapid.

Anonymity has long been studied online; it enables public participation while concealing real-name identities. But the platformisation of the Internet has …

The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

In such countries, media will usually be more strongly restricted, and social media could thus …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Vivian Gerrand, whose focus is on alternative narratives that may be used to disrupt the misogynist manosphere and counter violent extremism (CVE). This is not only an online task, as such networks also extend into the offline space, and it must address both push and pull factors.

The present paper specifically focusses on the role of drawing in disrupting misogyny and providing alternative narratives. Such narratives directly address root causes such as real and perceived grievances; they acknowledge the kernel of truth underlying such grievances, and are delivered through credible messages …