It’s the first day proper of AoIR 2018, and I’m starting with a panel on politics on the Russian Internet; the first speaker is Galina Miazhevich, whose focus is on the presidential campaign of celebrity candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against Vladimir Putin in the March 2018 election and was exposed to a considerable amount of trolling and mockery.

Sobchak, then aged 36, is one of the most influential women in Russia; her father was mayor of Russia and well-connected to the Putin regime, and there are rumours that Sobchak is Putin’s goddaughter. She is a Russian socialite (‘Russia’s …

I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides:

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on the activities of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, described as the Russian ‘troll factory’ and indicted for its involvement in Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

There are three forms of propaganda that have been identified in past literature: ‘white’ propaganda has a known source; ‘grey’ propaganda has an obfuscated source; and ‘black’ propaganda claims to be from a legitimate source but isn’t. Is this a useful classification in this context? Do the processes of propaganda dissemination …

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

Estonians are particularly strong Internet (and social media) users; this is especially pronounced for younger Estonians. When the European refugee crisis emerged, this manifested in the rapid creation of various …

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Lea Stahel, who begins with the story of two Muslim schoolkids in a Swiss school, who refused to shake the hand of their female teacher for cultural reasons. This was settled quickly within the school itself, but was raised again out of context by online media coverage some three months after the event, demonstrating how non-mediated and mediated contexts can diverge in the digital age.

There is a perception of legitimacy at the macro-level that influences particular publics’ judgments and actions, and that is affected in turn by …

The next paper in this Social Media and Society 2018 session is by Michael Bossetta, Chris Zimmermann, and Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, whose interest is in patterns in post-Brexit Facebook discussions. In particular, what is the role of emotions in these discussions, and what are their implications? The project gathered data using the Vox Populi data collection, enhanced with other data.

The analysis employed SentiStrength and other sentiment detection algorithms to assess the sentiment, emotionality, arousal, core emotions, and fine-grained feelings in Facebook posts from three major Facebook pages related to the Brexit referendum; most of the discussion took place here …

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

One of the common targets in this complicated manoeuvre is George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire who is generally accused of funding liberal civil society institutions and has been attacked by …