Politics

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

Potential drivers for such negativity may include …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Jasmin Kadel, who presents a comparative study of polarisation across Switzerland and Germany. Polarisation can be understood along factual (across issues), perceived (misjudgments about polarisation in society), and affective dimensions (appreciation of co-partisan others); the study examined such polarisation amongst adult newspaper readers in both countries.

Factual polarisation turned out to be slightly stronger in Switzerland than in Germany, but it is weak in both countries; perceived polarisation, however, is greater in both countries, and especially so in Germany – Germans are less polarised but see them selves as more polarised …

The first session on this first full day at ECREA 2018 is on polarisation, and starts with Melanie Magin. She begins by highlighting the potential deleterious effects of polarisation on society: societies need a common meeting ground, and this has traditionally been provided by the news media and their agenda-setting function. But the diversification of information sources and channels may contribute to fragmenting this, and the algorithmic selection of content in these channels could aid this fragmentation – yet there is very little empirical evidence for the existence of the echo chambers or filter bubbles this is said to cause …

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified …

The final speaker at this iCS Symposium is Yiping Xia, who returns our focus to the Russian-operated Internet Research Agency troll farm. One of their most successful accounts was @Jenn_Abrams, active across multiple platforms (Wordpress, Medium, Telegram, Gab) and followed by some 70,000 accounts on Twitter.

What is interesting about Jenna Abrams ‘her’-self is the creation of a distinct persona and mode of self-presentation; this account represents an interpersonal mode of disinformation. This is a form of the authenticity work which is also common to the online persona construction by ordinary users, strategic actors …

The next speaker in this iCS Symposium is Michael Bossetta, who focusses on the specific problems of spearphishing, disinformation, and bot activity on social media platforms. Could these problems be investigated by researchers conducting a controlled, simulated cyberattack themselves?

Michael pursued this especially for the context of Twitter, which seems most conducive to such research. This drew on the Python software SNAP_R, which captures the recent tweets from a defined list of accounts and uses Markov models to generate new messages to these users that to speak to their apparent interests. Michael created a new Twitter account to post …

The final iCS Symposium session continues the bot theme with a presentation by Pascal Jürgens. Pascal begins by outlining our current dilemma: threats of communicative manipulation via social media are rising, yet our access to the platform data we need to understand these activities is declining. But we may be able to address this dilemma by employing new and different methodologies.

Interestingly, in Germany there are now moves to create a law that requires bots to be labelled – yet this is unlikely to be effective unless there can be a clear definition of bots in the first place, and …

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what …

The final speaker in this iCS Symposium session is Laura Ianelli, whose focus is on understanding the supporters of conspiracy theories. Some such theories may be amusing, but many others are in fact deadly serious and can have significant negative effects. The networks for these theories can be closed epistemological networks with distinctive self-sealing qualities, and who are increasingly suspicious of broader social networks; this makes them difficult to reach for critical scholars.

Drawing on available digital traces in platforms such as Facebook would be one solution to this, but the increasing closure of its APIs is making this more …

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

This project worked in partnership with a political marketing company that provides data-driven political marketing strategies for actors in multiple countries around the world. The company develops its own tools and gathers its own data …